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