Hi Darrick, Thanks for the tip! Setting FLASH=Secondary in comBIOS solved the problem! (I've already tried this setting with the original comBIOS 1.33 but it didn't help at that time so I gave up on this.)
Now the CF card is _immediately_ detected as: Pri Mas TRANSCEND LBA Xlt 987-64-63 1990 Mbyte It still shows up as "Primary Master", as if the FLASH=Secondary setting had no effect. The GRUB "Disk read error" is gone, it auto-boots perfectly. However I haven't tried what happens if I power-cycle it (I'm not at the box now). Tamas > Tamas, > > I've used the Transcend cards, but on most of the Soekris net5501 > systems, the cards show up most of the time as Secondary Master. That > doesn't bother me as the boot system I'm using doesn't care where the > drive is, but I could see how grub could be confused (especially if it > changes at some point in the future and behaves as Primary Master). > > For all new systems I've gone to the SanDisk. They have done the most > work in the CF arena with several other companies licensing technology > from SanDisk. See if you can find a similar document on SanDisk's > website. I sure couldn't when I looked a few months back. It would be > more reassuring if there was such a document. > > Darrick > > Tamas Vincze wrote: >> 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 _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
