Follow-up: It doesn't work after power-cycling the box;
behaves just like with the FLASH=Primary setting.
Time to get a CF-to-IDE adapter... Thanks Steve for the idea!

Tamas

> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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