[nsp] Booting from compact flash cards began to fail on 7200s

[Matti Saarinen]

I'm fairly sure that I've been doing something that's not suppoted at
all. But until now I've no problems with the setup I describe below.

I've been succesfully using 32 MB compact flash (with adapters, of
course) as flash disk's on our 7200s (ie. the router sees the compact
flash card as for example disk0). The routers have booted fine from
the cards when on the bootflash there's been a bootldr image that
recognises flash disks.

Now, when I tried downloading software on disk1 on two 7200s both
routers crashed. The more annoying part is that the didn't boot
anymore but crashed again when the booloader image had recognised most
of the interfaces (but not all!). When I switch off the box's power
and switcheed it on again, the router did boot (but not when the new
image was on the compact flash). 

Now to make the routers crash, I need only to insert the compact flash
card on PCMCIA slot and issue the show file systems command.

Now, I do really wonder what has changed? Both PCMCIA slots on the
routers work fine. I've tried with ordinary PCMCIA cards.

Cheers,

-- 
- Matti -