Hardware

Got my brand new 6501-30 (600MHz) in earlier this week.
Tried to boot it off of a USB stick, but somehow I cannot get that to work at all.

So I took the CF card in my VIA box, plus the SATA converter for it, and put the beta generic-serial version on it. Works like a charms.

It does seem to be quite picky on the CF you're using though.
A simple 32MB Sandisk card (Canon branded) and a 256MB Sandisk are not seen at all by the SATA controller. My Transcend that I've been using in the VIA box for 2 years or so no, it seen.


As for the USB problem, I've tried several options by now.
HP USB Boot Util, diskpart, gzcat write, gunzip -c write, but nothing seems to make it boot.
Sure would be nice to have a simple way of getting this done.

Just read that the comBIOS does not support booting from USB yet.
http://blog.bytemine.net/2011/09/27/net6501-en/
That explains the problem I had of not being able to boot the USB drive....

Hopefully the new BIOS is released soon with support for this.

Bought a CF to PCI-X converter on eBay to boot the machine, but not working.
No drive found on either port.

Reason might be that it was advertised as an adapter for the Asus EEE netbooks, but for 5 USD it was a cheap try out.

So, I will need to wait for USB boot support in the BIOS now.