[Soekris] CF card not recognised on net5501-70 (SOLVED)

[Rogier Krieger]

Dear list,

Today, UPS delivered a new net5501 board for use in a console server.
Installation worked fine, but upon subsequent reboots and cold starts,
the CF card did not get detected reliably. The card in question is a
Silicon Systems Inc. one, sized at 1 GByte. On ComBIOS v1.33, the
setting FLASH=Secondary did not solve the issue. An earlier card of
this type worked flawlessly for me. Probably, that net5501 was using
ComBIOS 1.32i (unsure, it's at a customer now, happily doing its
work).

What did solve my detection problem was the following:
+ Update the ComBIOS to v1.33b [1]
+ Set FLASH=Primary (setting it to secondary did *not* work)

Thanks to Wim Vandeputte who suggested the above.

For updating the ComBIOS, I used lrzsz [2]. Please note that this
ComBIOS revision is not yet linked from the Soekris download page, so
this comes with a WfM condition (i.e. if you use it, you so entirely
at your own peril).

Cheers,

Rogier


References:
1. Soekris Engineering - ComBIOS v1.33b download (not officially
linked, use at your own risk)
http://soekris.com/software/b5501_133b.bin
2. OpenBSD packages for 4.3 - lrzsz
http://www.openbsd.org/4.3_packages/i386/lrzsz-0.12.20p0.tgz-long.html

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