Hit F2 at power-on to get into the BIOS that identifies itself as "Insyde Software SCU". (On boot up it identifies itself as "Insyde Software MobilePRO BIOS 4.20.00").
Unusually the BIOS menu does have a 'Version' option under the 'Exit' drop down menu. This reports BIOS version 1.05.03 Date: 10/13/04. I couldn't find any updates on the Fujitsu Siemens support pages.
The boot options that can be set are:
You can also get straight to these options by hitting the F12 key.
Separately you can set the IDE boot order. With a pen drive plugged in to a USB port this showed:
The FC032 is the 32MB Compact Flash card.
Note: If you bring up the boot menu with the F12 key you only have the four basic boot options. You cannot select which IDE device it will boot from if that's your choice.
Originally I had issues with booting Tiny Core from a pen drive using Syslinux as the boot loader. These seem to have gone away in time and I booted Tiny Core v8.2 from a 1GB pen drive. However...
The BIOS includes an option where you can set the mode of operation of the IDE interface (see photo right).
As delivered it was set as shown - to "Ultra ATA-33". With this setting the standard firmware
apparently runs without any problems but other software such as Tiny Core does not. I did get somewhere
by changing the setting to "Fast PIO" but it still didn't really help.
In the dmesg output I was finding stuff like:
ata2: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)
ata2: drained 8192 bytes to clear DRQ
ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata2.00: failed command: READ DMA
ata2.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
ata2: soft resetting link
ata2.00: configured for MWDMA2
ata2.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
ata2: EH complete
ata2: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)
ata2: drained 8192 bytes to clear DRQ
ata2.00: limiting speed to MWDMA1:PIO4
ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata2.00: failed command: READ DMA
ata2.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
ata2: soft resetting link
ata2.00: configured for MWDMA1
ata2.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
ata2: EH complete
ata2: lost interrupt (Status 0x58)
ata2: drained 8192 bytes to clear DRQ
ata2.00: limiting speed to PIO4
ata2.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
ata2.00: failed command: READ DMA
ata2.00: cmd c8/00:08:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 4096 in
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout)
ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
ata2: soft resetting link
ata2.00: configured for PIO4
ata2.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0
ata2: EH complete
sda: sda1
To cut a long story short I found I had problems if the Compact Flash card was bigger than 32MB. Partitioning a larger card so that it started with a small (<32MB) boot partition didn't help.
With the 32MB CF card and the BIOS IDE setting set to Ultra ATA-100 I had no problems with Tiny Core 8.2.
In my afternoon's play I came to the conclusion that the Compact Flash needs to be <=32MB.
My S200 runs eLux NG.