SS4200-E Serial Connection for NAS4Free

The SS4200-E has a header for a 9 pin serial (DE9) connector.  There is even a knockout on the back for the connector.  This page describes the pinout in great detail.  The key point, and I can't stress this enough, is that the motherboard header is an Intel/DK style instead of the more common AT/Everex style.  I pulled out an old connector, and I spent a day trying to figure out if that, the null modem cable, or the usb to serial adapter on my desktop was bad.

I finally got it to work after resoldering the DE9 connections.  My SS4200 has a bios setting for the serial connection.  It was set to:

• Serial Port Mode: 115200 8,n,1
• Flow Control: None
• Terminal Type: ANSI
• VT-UTF8 Combo Key Support: Enabled

Eventually, I was able to get this to work using Putty and the settings here.  However, I turned flow control off in both Putty and in the device manager for the serial port.

This is great for getting into the bios.  My next step was to install NAS4Free from the USB image to the 2GB SanDisk Ultra compact flash card mounted in the PATA port.  I could see text in the terminal but it eventually froze. 

I then used another computer to install NAS4Free from USB to compact flash.  I put the compact flash back into the SS4200-E, but it would freeze.  I remembered reading somewhere that it defaulted to 9600 baud, so I closed putty and opened at the 9600 baud setting.  Sure enough, I could see NAS4Free booting.  Eventually, it gave the error "The device that contains the config file (config.xml) could not be found."  More googling led to this, which explains that the most likely culprit is that the bios isn't dealing with the CF card very well.  Which is odd, because it managed to boot pretty far.  Maybe that isn't the problem....

I'm going to try reinstalling from USB to CF directly on the SS4200-E again.  Now that I know the baud settings might change, I can default the SS4200-E to 9600 baud and work with that.