[Soekris] SATA failures on 2 x net5501-70 units

[Martin Johnson]

I  recently purchased two new net5501-70 units from Soekris.eu, and  
have spent a few hours today trying to make sense of the errors I'm  
getting with two different SATA laptop drives.  (In the longer term I  
would probably buy E5Kxxx or E7Kxxx drives for better reliability, but  
I'd like to de-risk the SATA support first...).  Detailed config info  
at the bottom of this email.

Results for combios v1.33 with SATA drive connected:-
         - Cold boot sometimes hangs silently (4 LEDs on, no RS232  
output) with the Hitachi drive.
         - Cold boot doesn't always see either SATA drive.
         - Warm boot doesn't always see either SATA drive.
         - FreeBSD 7.0p2 installer PXEboots OK but does not see either  
SATA drive ("no disks found" when "standard installation" is chosen  
from menu) even when Combios has found the drive.

Results for combios v1.33b with SATA drive connected:-
         - as 1.33, except...
         - Samsung SATA drive is never detected by the Combios (warm  
or cold).
         - Hitachi SATA drive is occasionally detected by the Combios,  
but then not by the FreeBSD installer.

All rather frustrating!

Questions...
- Why isn't SATA working?
	- is there a manufacturing problem on recent net5501-70 units?
	- is the combios support not yet stable for SATA drives?
	- is there a much older combios I should be using?  (I also tried  
1.32i with the Hitachi drive but that didn't help.)

- When the SATA drives are detected by combios, why doesn't the  
FreeBSD 7.0p2 installer see them?  Do I need to add something to the  
GENERIC kernel?

- Are PATA/IDE drives more reliable than SATA drives on the net5501?


Thanks for any pointers!

- Martin.


----------------
Config. Info:-
----------------
	SATA drives used: 1 x Hitachi Travelstar 5K160 160GB, 1 x Samsung  
HM160JI 160GB.  (one drive on each net5501.)
	Cards used: none (no CF, no PCI, no miniPCI).
	PSU used: 12 volt 5 amp Mascot unit.
	Combios settings:
         	ConSpeed = 9600
        	 	ConLock = Enabled
         	ConMute = Disabled
         	BIOSentry = Enabled
         	PCIROMS = Enabled
         	PXEBoot = Enabled
         	FLASH = Secondary
         	BootDelay = 5
         	FastBoot = Disabled
         	BootPartition = Disabled
         	BootDrive = 80 FF FF FF
         	ShowPCI = Enabled
         	Reset = Hard
         	CpuSpeed = Default