Hi, I purchased a 2GB Transcend CF card (TS2GCF266) for use with net5501 and copied one of the EMBCop images to it. comBIOS 1.33 hasn't recognized the card, but after flashing it to 1.33c the card showed up. However GRUB won't auto-boot: it always goes to the grub> prompt, although grub.conf has the "default 0" line at the top. Probably it's caused by a disk reading error, because if type:
grub> root (hd0,0) it says: Error 25: Disk read error What's interesting is that it always fails if I try it many times within about a minute, and then it always works. If I just wait for a minute after getting the initial grub> prompt and then enter the "root" command it would also work. It looks like something isn't settled properly and some kind of a timeout needs to happen before GRUB's stage 2 can access the CF. After that EMBCop boots up and works properly. I tried to set BootDelay to 60 seconds in comBIOS but it won't wait for more than 16 seconds. This is bad because the box won't boot up after a power failure, it would always need manual attention. I suspect the recommendation would be to buy a SanDisk card. ;) So here's the main question: I know the Transcend card I have ($18) has built-in hardware ECC and wear-leveling. Is there a SanDisk card known to work that also has these features, or at least ECC? Their web site doesn't say anything about it and I'd like to make sure that corrupt data won't be returned by the CF card unnoticed. I've read that someone had success by using a CF-to-IDE adapter. Those look all-passive boards, it's hard to believe that they could fix the CF problem by simple wiring. Isn't the same wiring used on the net5501 board to connect the CF socket to the IDE bus? For Soren: Here's a 79-page datasheet from Transcend about their 266X CF cards. Perhaps it has a piece of information needed to address the problem in comBIOS or in the net5501 hardware: http://www.transcendusa.com/support/dlcenter/datasheet/TSXGCF266.pdf Best, Tamas _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
