Hello,
Is there a bug / mis-feature of the BIOS that prevents it from sizing large
drives correctly?
Does comBIOS v1.33 have a problem booting a kernel from a large partition?
=-=
On our net5501-70 we have installed both a:
SanDisk Extreme III CF card 16 GB
OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD 240 GB
When the Soekris net5501-70 powers on, the net5501 displays on the console port:
comBIOS ver. 1.33 20070103 Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Soekris
Engineering.
net5501
0512 Mbyte Memory CPU Geode LX 500 Mhz
Pri Mas SanDisk SDCFX3-16384 LBA Xlt 1024--63 16007
Mbyte
Pri Sla OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD LBA Xlt 1024-255-63 134 Gbyte
The size of the CF looks reasonably correct, however the SSD is well short of
240 GB.
When the Debian installer starts to partition the disks, it reports the correct
size:
SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 16.4 GB ATA SanDisk SDCFX3-1
SCSI1 (0,1,0) (sdb) - 240.1 GB ATA OWC Mercury Extr
Our first attempt at a Debian install failed at GRUB boot time ... we suspect
because
the BIOS could not seek far enough into the 240 GB SSD to boot the kernel.
As a work-a-round we are formatting with small /boot partitions at the start of
each drive:
SCSI1 (0,0,0) (sda) - 16.4 GB ATA SanDisk SDCFX3-1
> #1 primary 248.5 MB B f ext3 /boot
> #3 primary 15.4 GB f ext3 /
> #2 primary 718.3 MB f swap swap
SCSI1 (0,1,0) (sdb) - 240.1 GB ATA OWC Mercury Extr
> #1 primary 248.5 MB f ext3 /ssd/boot
> #3 primary 238.8 GB f ext3 /ssd
> #2 primary 1.0 GB f swap swap
FYI:
We suspect the BIOS would not have any problem booting from a 16 GB CF card.
It was the 240 GB SSD that the comBIOS could not boot from. We are building a
dual
boot system, so we decided to partition the CF card in the same style as the
SSD.
chongo (Landon Curt Noll) /\oo/\
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