I'm Booting a Jornada 720 with external PCMCIA 2.5" drive!

Ok the title is little misleading:

I saw during the kernel boot-up that BOTH the pcmcia and CF slots are seen as PCMCIA slots. so it occured to me that you should be able to boot from either. So I decided to test this theory and the answer is yes (but you may need to boot from CF initially becasue of wince's crappy driverless world).

I bought a PCMCIA external hardrive (databook) and imaged my CF card onto it. very similiar to the one in this ebay auction: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8785344189 but mine is an original databook while this is a rebranded IBM one. but they are the same.

I plugged it into my j720 with wince running and the drive spun up but nothing happened. but when I booted the kernel with my CF card the kernel found the external drive FIRST and mounted and started using it as the primary root partition!


So to confirm this is took a 16MB CF card and placed only a zImage, initrd.gz, params.txt, and linexec.exe files on it. I then booted the kernel and inserted the PCMCIA card with the drive attached. The results we great! My root file system is now ~10 GB in size :-)


Now this is NOT a portable solution but it is a great solution for testing and cross compilation! As I now have a hard drive. however becasue this uses the PCMCIA the only way to network would be the use a serial PPP connection (but hey there's always a downside right ;-) I'm going to try to look into how to create a PPP <-> PPP serial link. i hope it's similar to a dial-up PPP link.


Anyway those of you who are hurting for space during testing or compilation. get your hands on an external PCMCIA drive (not an internal one as those are type III's and won't fit in the j720) and put an old 2.5" laptop hard drive in it! I can confirm that the databook line (IBM too) is a 5V 16-bit interface. Also please note I did not want find out if ti can power the drive so I plugged in the PCMCIA case's AC adapter so the j720 does not have to privide power (it might but I did nto want to put that much stress on the battery)

I'll try to post pictures when I can.




Edited by weblacky 2006-03-23 6:04 PM

Wow, that rules! What OS are you using?

I'm definitely looking forward to photos!

First I need to clarify something. the hard drive is partitioned in the SAME way as the CF card. That is the root file system is on hda2.

I'm using linux of course :-) You need to boot the kernel with a CF card as normal but you can have your main file system on the hard drive. Works great!

My camera isn't doing this justice but I'm trying to get pictures.

Ok here are the pictures of the j720 with the drive on it.


The screen shots did not work. But they showed df -h with alomst 8GB of free space on the ext2 drive. I got a really cool desktop image too.

Very cool, but you could get a 4 or even a 2.2gb microdrive, and never run out of space. Unless if you decide to turn your 720 into a jukebox or something..

Because the raw files will probably never fill it up anyways.

I have a 2GB CF card now and have filled it half way up becasue of all the dependences and of course dangling dependcies from programs I installed and later uninstalled. I have no idea how to identify all packages that do not meet the depednecy of another package (so they are bottom level of the tree) so i can start removing what I do not need. Also for a compilation systemyou get more room PLUS swapfiles...

Haha. I think you need to work on your maintenance skills..

/usr/share/locale is probably around 100mb or more, /usr/share/doc is probably around that too. A bunch of extra junk was installed with the programs that your 720 probably cannot use as well, such as the kernel source 2.6 package. (17mb)

And after all that, I am still amazed that you got 1gb full...haha.

I used deborphan and aptitude to remove old libs and dependencies from unused apps. I'm still trying to ID the major culprits.

Never install kernel source, why would it? Unless I tried to compile stuff I would never need any kernel headers or source files.

Also I built a large amount of modules (but that's not big) for the kernel to use things like iptables.

Also I would not be too surprised if I were you about how much space I was using...I had to install kdelibs to experiment with any apps that used anything related to KDE and also the stupid GNOME stuff becasue I use ICEWM (which is fast and rocks by the way).

but I've removed all the kde stuff now.

But interesting call on locale (76MB) and /usr/share/doc/ (48M). Also from doing a quick du -h --max-depth=2 on /usr I can see that the majority of my space was allocated to /usr/share/doc/ and /usr/share/lib/. The docs are easy to take care of but the libs....that is a problem. the dependencies have installed many libs (like qt, python, etc). it is hard to know what I can take out.

But I was working on finding what applications worked for me and getting things working...not on making things smaller. You start doing that once all your requirements are done...mine are note. FYI still waiting for pine-ssl...

I've gotten quite a bit done and am almost ready to start taking a hack saw to my setup. I just want everything to work first...then prune it.

Ok well I did not remove any of the /usr/share/docs (becasue I just don't know what I'll need in the future). but I'm now down to a total of 502MB. I also found that apt lists are taking up around 40MB and that I'm still having something of a lib problem. about 80MB+ of my space is nothing but libs...but cannot seem to tell any obvious ones (they have cryptic names). I also cleared the cached log files. Also aptitude and dpkg cache are pretty big but I canot touch them. I also cleared all the stuff from several runs of deborphan. Well anyway I'm 502MB on a 1.7GB partition...I think I'm good for now. If I need to reclaim more space I'll backup the /usr/share/doc directory and remove it from the main filesystem but I gain more by leaving them on right now.

Pine-ssl has been completed for a long, long time now.

I posted its completion, and for you to contact me for the download.

Yeah, kde takes up a lot of space, I forgot about that. Anyways, you will probably not run out of space on your 2.2gb drive anyways. The only way to do that would be with either multimedia, or a huge compile that would surely set the processor on fire.

-No more playing, I am sending you a PM to contact me tomorrow about Pine.

Huuumm... Well I know you said you finished it and sent it out to be packaged...but when I do an apt-get update I do not see a pine or pine-ssl. The forum sends me thread updates so I know my email address is right...but I did not get any kind of message from you regarding this.

It has not been sent out to be packaged, snickersmd was not available. Just IM me already, so that I can open my ftp server.