Hi ArchiMark,
here a step by step guide to get you a ALARM booting of a SD card. From there everything else should be a breeze.
Following steps have been confirmed and tested. Any issues , just ask.
00. Wipe your microdrive partitions (OPTIONAL) (following steps will erase all on your microdrive card)
Boot into D+B emergency then do a:
fdisk /dev/hda
"d" enter until all partitions are deleted
"w" to write and exit
01. Install arch-kexecboot from my github https://github.com/greguu/linux-3.11.3-borz...leases/tag/v0.402. On you linux machine LM17 download http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-armv5-latest.tar.gz and save it on your home folder /home/yourusername
open terminal as user
cd ~
wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-armv5-latest.tar.gz
03. Take a working SD card and place it in your LM17 laptop (do not mount it from you desktop environment)
(following steps will erase all on your SD card)
open a terminal and become root
(this is an example, change sdc to the sdX that reflects the SD card)
fdisk /dev/sdc
"d" enter until all partitions are deleted
then
"n" enter to create a new partition
"p" to set primary
"1" to set partition number one
and double enter to accept default size (full SD card)
"p" to verify you new partition layout
"w" to write to disk
Then format to ext4 and mount.
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1
mkdir /mnt/sdarch
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdarch
04. Unpack the ArchLinuxARM-armv5-latest.tar.gz cd /mnt/sdarch
tar xf /home/yourusername/ArchLinuxARM-armv5-latest.tar.gz
(this will take a while)
05. Remove zImage from /mnt/sdarch/boot06. Copy kernel "zImage-3.11.3-c3x00" and "boot.cfg" from my git hub to /mnt/sdarch/boot 07. Edit boot.cfg to look like this: LABEL=ArchLinuxARM
KERNEL=/boot/zImage-3.11.3-c3x00
APPEND=root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootfstype=ext4 fbcon=rotate:1 noinitrd loglevel=3
08. Copy 3.11.3-c3x00 folder to /mnt/sdarch/lib/modules (no need to copy firmware files, they are already installed)
(you can remove the 4.x kernel and other modules folder under /mnt/sdarch/lib/modules)
09. Edit /mnt/sdarch/etc/fstab to look like this /dev/mmcblk0p1 / ext4 noatime,nodiratime,commit=600,reservation,defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
10. Download keymap file from github , borzoi.map.gz
as root :
cd /mnt/sdarch/usr/share/kbd/keymaps
mkdir zaurus
cp /home/yourusername/borzoi.map.gz /mnt/sdarch/usr/share/kbd/keymaps/zaurus
create and edit /mnt/sdarch/etc/vconsole.conf to like this:
KEYMAP=borzoi
11. Unmount SD card and place in Z, boot Z ! (user "root" / pass "root" )12. Then repeat all these steps for the microdrive ( Once you got ALARM on your micro drive, keep this SD card, it might come in handy as a rescue system.)