Installation on a Compact Flash Card

Use a fast (133x or better) card with 4 GB or more. We're using a SanDisk Ultra 200x 8 GB.

Mounted the CF on a Linux PC via a USB card reader. Card appears as /dev/sde1

As the card is larger than 4 GB I partitioned it to match Dave's card: 

disk /dev/sdb: 4009 MB, 4009549824 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 487 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xe7cf73dd

  Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   *           2         487     3903795   83  Linux
sudo fdisk /dev/sde
p
d (deleted FAT partition)
n
p
1
2
487  (added Linux partition)
a
1 (made partition bootable)
p (should now match Dave's card)
w

Then installed an ext3 filesystem: 

sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sde1

Copy the image onto the CF: 

gunzip dbbc_if.gz
sudo dd if=dbbc_cf of=/dev/sde

Mount the disk 

sudo mount /dev/sde1 /mnt/tmp

Edit /mnt/tmp/fstab and change first line to read 

/dev/sda1 /       ext3       noatime,acl,user_xattr        1 1

Edit /mnt/tmp/boot/grub/menu.lst and replace references to the disk partition to /dev/sda1: 

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Fri May 14 13:24:28 UTC 2010
default 0
timeout 8
gfxmenu (hd0,0)/boot/message
##YaST - activate

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux###
title openSUSE 10.3
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.5-31-default root=/dev/sda1 vga=0x31a    splash=silent showopts
    initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.22.5-31-default

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe###
title Failsafe -- openSUSE 10.3
    root (hd0,0)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.5-31-default root=/dev/sda1 vga=normal showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off noresume nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 edd=off 3
    initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.22.5-31-default

Unmount, eject and boot on DBBC!

4 GB card installation

Tim has been having trouble getting the 8 GB card to boot so I got a 4 GB SanDisk Ultra 200x card.

Partition table initially showed 

4011 MB, 4011614208 cylinders
128 heads, 63 cylinders/track, 971 cylinders
units = cylinders of 8064 * 512 = 4128768 bytes

so in the “extra functionality” mode of fdisk I changed number of cylinders to 487 and number of heads to 255

partition table then could be made to match Dave's.