Fresh install for Soekris net5501 gets stuck on boot

sirjorj

I have been a long time m0n0wall user and was really bummed to see that it is EOL. I had a 3+ year uptime with it on my Soekris net5501.

But it's time to move on, and I like some of the features that pfSense offers (upnp on a per-IP basis seems great for video came consoles). However, in making the switch I hit a snag.

I flashed pfSense-2.2.2-RELEASE-4g-i386-nanobsd.img to a 4G SanDisk CF card, popped it into my net5501-70 (with a vpn1211 in the mini-pci slot), and fired it up. Once I got the baud rate issues resolved, the boot process seemed to hang. The interesting part is here:


Timecounters tick every 1.000 msec
IPsec: Initialized Security Association Processing.
usbus0: 12Mbps Full Speed USB v1.0
usbus1: 480Mbps High Speed USB v2.0
ugen0.1: <amd>at usbus0
uhub0: <amd 1="" 9="" ohci="" root="" hub,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 1.00="" 1.00,="" addr="">on usbus0
ugen1.1: <amd>at usbus1
uhub1: <amd 1="" 9="" ehci="" root="" hub,="" class="" 0,="" rev="" 2.00="" 1.00,="" addr="">on usbus1
uhub0: 4 ports with 4 removable, self powered
random: unblocking device.
uhub1: 4 ports with 4 removable, self powered
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): ATA_IDENTIFY. ACB: ec 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): CAM status: Command timeout
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): Retrying command
run_interrupt_driven_hooks: still waiting after 60 seconds for xpt_config
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): ATA_IDENTIFY. ACB: ec 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): CAM status: Command timeout
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): Error 5, Retries exhausted
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): ATA_IDENTIFY. ACB: ec 00 00 00 00 40 00 00 00 00 00 00
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): CAM status: Command timeout
(aprobe0:ata0:0:1:0): Retrying command</amd></amd></amd></amd>

Looks like an issue reading a drive. The CF card is the only storage device attached.
Did I get the wrong image? Or is booting from CF not supported? Or did I make some other mistake?

DickB

Don't know if the 5501 has the same problem as the 6501 that I have but I had to install 2.1.5 and then upgrade to 2.2.1 (guess it will be the same for 2.2.2) to get it booting.
My 6501 has a hard disk, not a CF but it may react the same so give it a try.

croak

I have a 6501 with pfSense installed on a 4GB USB drive and I had the same issue as DickB. The same resolution worked for me also.

sirjorj

I finally got around to trying this today.
It booted and ran 2.1.5 just fine, and I had it auto-update to 2.2.2. Upon rebooting, it had the same ATA problem and didn't boot.

Back to the CF card with M0n0wall for now…