Hi, Where can I find some background on the boot drive sequence in the comBIOS monitor, in particular with regard to USB booting?
This is mostly out of curiousity, trying to figure out what is going on (and perhaps learning a thing or two in the process). I just purchased a Soekris net6501, and successfully booted it with a bootable USB stick with FreeBSD. I used this to install FreeBSD 8 on the SSD that I bought along with the net6501. Since I am no expert in headless booting, FreeBSD nor Soekris, it took some time to figuring it all out, but once everything worked it was a real breeze (If it is deemed useful, I'm happy to post a how-to later.) My main OS is on the SSD, and I like to keep the USB stick as a rescue disk. It seems that "boot 80" will boot from my SSD, and "boot 81" will boot from the USB disk. 0x81 is explicitly specified during the boot sequence: - ------------------------------------------------------------- comBIOS ver. 1.41a 20111203 Copyright (C) 2000-2011 Soekris Engineering. net6501 1024 Mbyte Memory CPU Atom E6xx 1000 Mhz SATA AHCI BIOS ver. 0.6 20110902 Copyright (C) 2003-2011 Intel Corporation Controller Bus#02, Device#06, Function#00: 02 Ports, 01 Devices Port-00: Hard Disk, TS16GMSA300 Port-01: No device detected Soekris USB Expansion ROM ver. 1.01 20111203 81: USB 01 SanDisk Cruzer Fit Xlt 969-128-63 3910 Mbyte - ------------------------------------------------------------- If I add a 8 GB Imation USB stick to the external USB port (JP3), this changes to: - ------------------------------------------------------------- 81: USB 01 Xlt -2-32 Mbyte 82: USB 02 SanDisk Cruzer Fit Xlt 969-128-63 3910 Mbyte - ------------------------------------------------------------- >From a 2007 post, http://lists.soekris.com/pipermail/soekris-tech/2007-February/011543.html: The boot sequence can be set with the BootDriver parameter: BootDrive = 80 81 F0 FF 0x80 = master drive 0x81 = slave drive 0xF0 = PXE boot 0xFF = stop and go to comBIOS prompt However, from this info I would have expected 0x80 to be the mSATA port 0, and 0x81 the mSATA port 1. A small question and comment: 1. What if I had a second mSATA SSD, how would I specify that disk? As 0x81? Would the USB boot numbers in that case change to 0x82 and 0x83? 2. A small suggestion for the BIOS: would it be possible to add the "80" in front of the mSATA drive, just like "81: " an "82: " are appended to USB disks? Now it says "Port-00: ", which I find less useful. Regards, Freek _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
