AG wrote: > I ordered a Sundisk Ultra 16 GB CF-Card. This take the net5501. > I have installed Linux (Debian squeeze) with grub. I have no problems to > boot from the CF-Card > with grub.
Can you please post your BIOS bootup output (for the Sundisk Ultra 16 Gb card). Like you did for the 32Gb card at the start of this thread. Also can you confirm the exact number of sectors it reports, maybe "cat /proc/partition*" output will do. From your post at the start of this thread, your 32Gb reported: Pri Mas SanDisk SDCFX-032G _ Your other smaller CF card (that worked) reports: Pri Mas SAMSUNG CF/ATA LBA 994-16-32 254 Mbyte From my thread "Debian5/GRUB installation problems" around Aug-2010. Pri Mas SanDisk SDCFH-016G LBA Xlt 1024--63 15638 Mbyte My investigation revealed that GRUB worked fine, so long as my /boot partition was kept small (meaning I had about 7754 Kb). This was too small to be useful (and other bootloaders are not an option for me due to the requirement to remote upgrade a kernel and have remote downgrade and fallback ability by making use of hardware watchdog). I always claimed that the lack of the number of heads in the BIOS output above should be explained and that I think some calculation in the BIOS might be getting messed up when it needed to convert CHS to LBA. I never did get any answer from a couple of phone calls (to the US), a couple of emails (the Soekris HQ) and some detailed information posted into this mailing-list. The only way to prove this bug seemed to be to modify GRUB to add a new command that will load any arbitrary sector from the disk and hexdump it (and/or report any BIOS related errors, and also verify it is really reading data from the disk by pre-filing the buffer with a known byte-pattern and verifying two reads of on the same sector returned the same data). Alas; I never found time to add/implement that new GRUB command so see what happened when I tried to access the sector about 16Mb into the disk. So I think this claim about even larger disks at 32Gb might point to issues with CHS to LBA geometry calculations, especially since you don't even get any kind of size data. It is also interesting that the model number of my card is not too different from yours. I hope for a comBIOS 1.33d fix! or open-source version to allow the customer to investigate/fix fully. Maybe 6501 would have USB support by now and Soekris profits increase due to BIOS development being more about marshaling patches and picking/testing the best than waiting for the limited in-house developer capacity to finally churn out a new version. Darryl _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
