[Soekris] net5501 + SATA drive detection problem

[Denis Fortin]

Greetings...

I have one of the early net5501's which has been running fine with a  
2GB Sandisk CF card with FreeBSD on it from the start.

Wanting to add some storage,  I recently bought a SATA drive mounting  
kit and a Samsung HM250JI SATA drive for it.

My net5501 being old, I upgraded my BIOS (which used to me 1.31i) to  
1.33b so that it would detect the SATA drive.

Unfortunately, the drive is not detected by the BIOS at boot time...   
(regardless of whether I leave the CF card in the machine or I remove  
it, so it's not a master/slave issue).

Sigh.  Any suggestion as to what I should try next?  I've been using  
soekris machines since the first few net4801's and have never had  
problems adding disks in them before...

Kind regards,

Denis, fortin at acm.org

PS. The drive seems to spin up correctly when plug in the power...  it  
makes the expected whirring sound