Has anyone made progress in booting from USB?

[jml]

It'd be great to _reliably_ boot this puppy from a SATA / USB hard drive. I can seem to get it recognized about 1 out of 8 or 9 tries.... but have never been able to get fatload to work. As a matter of fact, even if I can see the drive in "usb info" and set it with "usb dev", "usb part" doesn't show any partitions, though if I boot from flash, fdisk shows a FAT12 and an ext3 partition. Any ideas?

Thanks...

jml

[karurosu]

Are you adding a delay, I think I read somewhere that you had to add a small delay before booting (5 secs?)

[bfmorgan]

JML,
  After you boot do you see sda in /dev? If so, do you then see sda1..n for the partitions?

  I have a Transcend USB SSD and have had no problems. Additionally, I have mounted a 500GB HD. Both of these drives do not get their power from the plug. I know several users have had trouble with plug USB power problems. Some have then used a powered USB hub with some success.

[jml]

Are you adding a delay, I think I read somewhere that you had to add a small delay before booting (5 secs?)

I'm not even getting that far. I'd be happy if I could reliably get the USB drive just to scan in Das U-boot. But thanks...

[jml]

If I boot from flash, I see the drive (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2) every time; no problems there. The issue is getting u-boot to see the disk so I can boot from _it_. I also throttled back the USB drive to 1.5G and it got a little more reliable in the scan, but still no partitions visible, thus I'm thinking a timing issue in the USB device discovery routine ("usb start" sometimes sees the device, sometimes times out, sometimes hangs).  I'm direct-connect, no external hub (though I'd love to use one), and power is external in a USB - to - SATA frame, so it's not a power issue..

I think I'll need to crack open the u-boot code and see if there's any way to tweak up the scan routines...

Thanks!

[jml]

Update:

It looks like this is related to the actual SATA-USB chipset on the drive enclosure (it's a JMicron unit). Substituted a PATA-USB enclosure with a Prolific Technology bridge and it's booted perfectly every time. I'll still dig into what's going on with the former as time permits.