SS4200-E PATA Tests

I established that NAS4Free was not recognizing the PATA port in the SS4200-E using default BIOS settings.  I then tried OpenMediaVault (another FreeNAS fork), but ran into the same problem where the CF card in the CF-IDE adapter was not seen, and then the laptop drive was not seen.

I switched ATA/IDE Configuration from "Enahnced" to "Compatible" in the BIOS and tried that.  This worked, but only one of the two SATA drives showed up.  It seems to only have a primary master and primary slave.

After switching back to "Enhanced," the system would not boot and complained mdamd had beens tarted with two drives.

After looking at this some more, I found the exact solution, at least for OpenMediaVault.

The post describes how to modify the ata settings using an editor.  The way to do it is to install while in compatible mode, boot, login as root, then add ata_piix and ide_generic to the /etc/initramfs-tools/modules file.  Update the system with 'update-initramfs -u' then reboot and reset the BIOS back to compatible.  The update-initramfs comand creates a new /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-amd64 file. The command after logging in as root were:

# echo ata_pix >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
# echo ide_generic >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules
# update-initramfs -u
# reboot

I did this, and it worked.  Now I am booting off the PATA drive and can see both SATA drives.  Something similar to this should work for NAS4Free.  I just need to find the equivalent commands and file to update.  One option I've seen that may be relevant is to provide device.hints.  Or maybe this option to update the boot image will work as well.