Booting from a CF card

[beestoneg]

I'm trying to boot an Epia 5000 mini-itx board from a Compact Flash Card using a CF>IDE adapter.

i know this can be done as i seen lads of posts in forums of people who have done this but i can't get mine to work

I have tried 3 known good CF cards (containing Monowall, Freenas and Debian) and two different adapters. All boot fine in my laptop but when attached to the Epia board the screen coes black after POST and needs the power button held down for 5 seconds to reset the board. it's like it's freezing at the bootloader.

Yet the Epia board will boot fine when attached to a 2.5" HD.

The board has the lastest BIOS on that i can find 2.07

Any ideas ? are there specific settings in the BIOS needed to get CF cards working ?

 

[wahnula]

I'm going out on a limb here and guessing the adapters are not compatible. Test them with the CF cards on another PC or two, see what the results are. You might just need to do a trial and error with lots of different adapters.

My story: trying to get a card reader to read from a known good XD card. Two card readers accepted the card, but neither read it. I bought a SD-to-XD adapter, it works on one machine's reader but not the other.

This is a relatively new area, until you can get another PC to boot with the adapter, I'd keep trying different adapters.

Tony

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[beestoneg]

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your reply The adapters work fine in both my laptop and another PC.

I already have a freeNAS box running with one of these Cards and adapters

But i get what you are saying these things do not seem to be createed equal. When building my FreeNAS box i came across a CF card that simply would not boot but works fine in another board with the same adapter.

the cards i am currently trying to get working in the VIA are the known good working ones from these experiments ie the card and adapter combos that seem to work in just about everthing. which makes me think it's setting in the VIA BIOS somewhere thats the problem

 

[wahnula]

So you HAVE had a successful boot with the device on another PC...

I don't know why the BIOS would be the problem, since it should not know it's a CF or an IDE device. As far as it knows, it is booting to an IDE device. I will admit it seems to be the only thing that makes sense though. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Tony

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