Booting without SATA controller?

[tinypoodle]

Have you even tried all potential options as hinted in Reply #4?

And what happens if you remove the USB key just after the initrd has finished loading?

[NotoriousPyro]

Have you even tried all potential options as hinted in Reply #4?

And what happens if you remove the USB key just after the initrd has finished loading?

Well . me sideways... It seems to boot if I remove the USB key and keyboard after microcore.gz has finished loading...

Could it be possible the USB is to blame?

Edit: I've changed the USB Emulation Type in the BIOS to Forced FDD and it seems to boot, if it's Hard Disk it just freezes up.

Any ideas?

[tinypoodle]

Could be related to the fact that both sata disks and USB storage emulated as HD are recognized as sdxN devices.

[NotoriousPyro]

Could be related to the fact that both sata disks and USB storage emulated as HD are recognized as sdxN devices.

So the NAS is dead basically? Unless I replace the onboard DOM with one larger than 128MB I suppose... Seems to boot fine from that without HDDs or USB devices.

[tinypoodle]

Why would you ask that without having tried to tweak libata parameters at boot?

Also, didn't you imply that by changing BIOS setting everything works as expected?

[NotoriousPyro]

I've dug around a little and found out the following. I got a 2.5 (44 pin) to 3.5 (40 pin) PATA adapter and I connected an old IDE HDD and I still couldn't get it to boot with a USB keyboard attached so I copied Ubuntu 10.10 server onto a USB drive and looked at a few boot options it has. I tried noapic and for some reason it works!

I'm going to try a SATA device with noapic soon and see what happens.

Thank you guys for your help!

[tinypoodle]

While Ubuntu may explicitely mention 'noapic', this is a parameter of the kernel per se ('nolapic' would be a related one) and nothing stops you to use it with TC (or other Linux systems).

[NotoriousPyro]

Yeah, I've managed to use noapic with the default software on the NAS and it works. nolapic seems to have weird effects so I've got rid of it since it seems to cause more problems than fixes them, though noapic works well

SATA and USB devices are working again now too! Thanks for the advice