Been a while

Yes, as ever ive been neglecting my blog.

Having a 1 year old son is very time consuming im slowly finding out

Anyhows I recently got hold of an Intel Atom 330 based board for AROS thanks to ClusterUK with the intention of writing a NIC driver for it .. which im slowly working my way through (RTL8168/8111). There have been a few setbacks - primarily AROS wouldnt boot on the box.

After a lot of searching and some insight from Error (Tomek Wiszkowski) it became evident that the ata.device was finding the ICH7 AHCI S-ATA controller, but couldnt use it. Not only this, but since it had found the controller it decided not to add legacy ports, which resulted in AROS finding no bootable devices. Luckily it was trivial to fix the issue and now AROS is booting happily on not only the Atom 330 board, but a whole bunch of other users ICH systems which had failed after ata.device got "upgraded".

Another issue was present which resulted in the early startup menu showing everytime the machine was booted, and couldnt be exited. Thankfully this was also relatively easy to identify and fix so now I can boot into wanderer quite comfortably - and have Installed AROS on a 200gig S-ATA drive attached to the system.

Theres still a peculiartiy though that makes it unable to boot the system (not sure yet if grub isnt installing to the MBR correctly, or some other issue is preventing it loading) -so I will have to look into this when I find time ..

.. but for now its onwards with the rtl8168.device ..