[SPARCbook] Re: PCMCIA Compact Flash

[Chris Powell]

On Thu, 19 Oct 2000 00:23:32 +0200 (CEST), Rainer Canavan wrote:

>      The  PCMCIA ATA card device driver supports PCMCIA ATA  disk
>      and flash cards that follow the following standards:
> 
> That's what you have there. SRAM cards are something completely different.
> There's some info about the differences between SRAM, "SanDisk" (yes,
> they renamed themselves) and intel-style flash cards at
> http://www.bsn.com/Support/FAQS/pcmcia.html
> and it has the benefit of beeing about solaris. Although it's a bit dated,
> it's definitively worth reading

Interesting web page. I had a good read and then tried a few things.

First, I did a boot -r to rebuild /dev. I then did a prtconf and
looked for any PCMCIA drivers or card without drivers. Inserting
the Compact Flash is picked up by prtconf and the card does indeed
get recognised as an ATA card (I previously thought the card would
be recognised as memory and use the pcmem/pcram driver, not the pcata
driver). Looking in /var/adm/messages the card is also reported there
(the first insertion only). The output from prtconf does not show any
textual information about the card (the web page says there should be
text output from prtconf showing the card identity).

However, no devices are made in /dev or /devices - even after a
drvconfig. Inserting a Callunacard DOES make the devices (prtconf
output doesn't change as the driver has been installed by the
Compact Flash). The Callunacard can then be mounted easily.

This could be due to thing missing from /etc/driver_aliases, but I
don't know what to put in this file as prtconf doesn't output the
text identity I was expecting for the Compact Flash card.

Removing the Callunacard leaves the devices present in /dev. I
then tried inserting the Compact Flash and using these devices that
had been created by the Callunacard. Trying a prtvtoc on any
of the /dev/dsk entries (c1d0p0-c1d0p3, c1d0s0-c1d0s15) just
hangs the shell. Trying to mount any of the /dev/dsk entries panics
the machine!

I'm really at a loss to figure why I can't see the Compact Flash
card as many others seem to be able to do. The PCMCIA ports and Solaris
support seem OK (the Callunacard works fine) and the card itself is
OK in a Windoze machine.

Any ideas?


Chris.