So I’ve been working with a bunch of Soekris net4801 boxes, using 8gb compact flash cards as disks for them. I struggled trying to get them to boot anything but tiny partitions (6 megs) for a long, long time. I couldn’t get anything to boot, there would always be some kind of error: GRUB Error 18 being the most common. I think I got GRUB Error 16 also, in all my trials and tribulations.
Ultimately, I gave up in frustration. Then I grabbed a different net4801 to work on at home. That one just happened to have BIOS version 1.31. It worked fine, I didn’t have to do anything special. The ones that didn’t work had BIOS version 1.29.
For some reason, BIOS 1.31 is not available for download, but I used 1.30 and it worked fine too… aahhh finally, after many wasted hours.
