[ECOS] Redboot from DiskOnChip trouble

[Rajesh Gottlieb <rajesh_gottlieb at yahoo dot com>]

> Hi,
> 
> I am having trouble to get the RedBoot loader to work
> from DiskOnChip. On my i386 target, a TS-5300, I dumped
> the redboot.bin file into the b: diskonchip device.
> After rebooting the target on the b: device I get the dots
> from redboot but after that the target does not show a 'Redboot>' prompt.
> 
> I also tried the DiskOnChip patch on the v2_0 version of Ecos.
> CYG_HAL_STARTUP_DISK was set, no joy either, same result.
> 
> I need DiskOnChip startup since there is no floppy device on my target.
> Is there a way to debug the redboot program in this early booting stage ?
> 
> Regards,
>   Rob van der Ouderaa

I see from another posting that your considering using GRUB to boot your
TS-5300 (http://www.embeddedx86.com/ if anyone is interested). A year or more
ago I successfully booted mine using GRUB. I installed GRUB on the compact
flash, not on the DiskOnChip (I didn't order my TS-5300 with DiskOnChip). The
fact that I have a compact flash to IDE adapter made the installation for me
easier. What I did was pull down the latest GRUB image from CVS and build it on
my linux box. You have to use the CVS image of GRUB since the snapshot is
horribly out of date and won't work on the TS-5300. Then I installed it on a
floppy again from linux. Next I booted another test PC with the floppy and with
my Compact flash plugged into my compact flash to IDE converter so the compact
flash is acting as a standard hard drive. Finally I used the standard grub
mechanism to install the grub image on a hard drive (my compact flash). Then I
plugged my compact flash back into my TS-5300 and it was able to boot and load
images both from ethernet or using the serial port. Of course there is no VGA
on the TS-5300 so you will have to configure GRUB to use the serial port for
I/O and you'll need to configure it for the ethernet chip on the TS-5300 if you
want to boot from ethernet. At the time I wasn't able to build an ecos image
that was compatible with the TS-5300's Cirrus Logic CS8900A Ethernet controller
so I didn't have ethernet support in ecos. I haven't tried since then, so maybe
some kind soul has created a pc target for ecos that supports that chip. If you
don't have a compact flash to IDE adapter handy you might be able to coax the
GRUB floppy image into the flash A:\ drive on the 5300 and boot from that (I
haven't tried it though). Anyway that was my experience.

-Raj

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