Plop installation on CF card

[Danny]

I was able to install Plop onto a CF card with a bit of difficulty.

The goal was to use my CF card to boot my server using (BSD-based) FreeNAS. I wanted Plop installed on the CF so I'd have the option of booting my server into Linux. Arch Linux is installed on a small partition at the tail-end of the NAS disk drive. The NAS boots from CF but it also has a 500GB hard drive.

The way I chose to install Plop was to first install GRUB on the CF card. Then Plop would be installed from GRUB. The "fly in the ointment" is that FreeNAS is installed on a UFS-formatted partition and grub-install does not run under UNIX -- at least that I know about. To get around this, I partitioned the CF card. By the way, my CF card is connected to an IDE adapter which makes it appear like a hard drive to the PC.

The first partition contains FreeNAS (UFS) and the second partition is simply unused space. I formatted the second partition as EXT2. I then installed GRUB onto that partition. These steps were performed by booting from a Linux rescue CD. I used a distribution called Parted Magic. Afterward, I attempted to boot from my CF card and complete the Plop installation.

For some reason, my GRUB installation was incomplete. There was no menu.lst file and I didn't want to try to create one. Booting from the CF card, I was dropped to the GRUB command line. I struggled here a bit. I finally realized the following commands would kick off the Plop installer:

linux16 (hd0,2)/boot/plpinstc.com
boot

From there on, it was smooth sailing! I don't know if this will help anybody else. Good luck!

[Elmar]

thanks for your howto

best regards
elmar