An update for anyone seeing the same issue.... Combios 1.33 was used
for all tests.
NOT WORKING:
My two recent net5501's do not work with any SATA drive: I tested
five different SATA laptop drive models. Cortex Systems told me that
they are currently investigating, and Soren's list post of 26th June
sounds like the same issue. Hopefully Soren will find a solution soon.
WORKING:
My older net5501 works OK with all five SATA test drives. After
netbooting, I was able to install a minimal FreeBSD 7.0 installation
on each drive, and then reboot cleanly into FreeBSD. (But, the same
hard drives would not then boot up if transferred to either of the
newer net5501 units.)
LESSON LEARNT:
At first, my older net5501 had problems with two out of my five SATA
test drives: lots of disk errors when the FreeBSD installer tried to
use it. This turned out to be my fault! The two SATA drives that
gave errors were from a laptop which used an ATA hard disk password.
Using the laptop to clear the password fixed that problem.
FEATURE REQUEST: If it's easy, it might be helpful if the ComBIOS
could check and report if the hard drive has a password set. It would
also be possible to clear the password but (by design) this erases any
data on the hard disk, and takes a long time for that reason. (Aside:
apparently some drives have a default master password which can be
used with suitable utilities to remove the user password non-
destructively.)
Cheers,
- Martin
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