Debian Squeeze/Wheezy on Ultra 2?

Thanks, I think I confirmed this by toggling the internal stick's bootable flag and running into a brick wall.
I also toyed with bootstrapping / chain booting, but no luck so far. I don't know if the Ultra 2 has a thing to show BIOS output, but even if it did I wouldn't have the hardware to connect it up. I did an installation over SSH and set everything up. The only thing I haven't managed yet is to chain boot BIOS --> USB drive --> hadr drive. Oh, and obviously LED control would be nice (for STEALTH MODE, all true tinkerers need this!). Anyone managed a chain boot who can share their syslinux.cfg? At this point I feel like I want to mindlessly copy-paste. ;)

For the record: my Ultra 2 is running quietly, noticeably faster than on RAIDiator, and with more features I need and fewer features I never used. I bought my ReadyNAS in 2012 so I got the 1.5 GHz Atom. Good to see that a modern x64 OS does so much good! "She" is running Arch Linux (bit of a Debian-fobia I'm afraid) and I really don't want to go back anytime soon. Now all that remains is to get the thing to chain boot... :-D

There is a serial port on it, would need to get a cable to connect to it. There are forum posts on the subject for wiring and such.

You could install /boot onto the internal flash, and /, etc on the disks. That should let you boot GRUB/etc from the flash through the BIOS and get into your OS. You would be wiping the flash, just DD a copy of it for backup if you need to restore it one day (its only like 6 files on FAT partition).

chirpa,
Thanks for the info! Is the serial connection purely text-based? I'm afraid my eye-sight is too limited to use something like the VGA out found on the bigger NAS systems (which is also one reason why I installed through SSH). I can do plain text, not text that's rendered and then sent over.

I'm currently doing exactly what you suggested: have Syslinux on the 128MB vfat drive and the rest on the hard drives. My motivation for switching to /boot on my primary partition is mostly cosmetic: I want to wrestle all the USB1.1/USB2.0 modules out of my running kernel. The USB1.1 ports are internal, the USB2.0 ports are on the back of the unit. I'm not very likely to ever use either.

I kept Netgear's partitions around, that being a 4GB rootfs, 512MB swap and ~2.7TB data. My two disks are in RAID1, which probably complicates my chain booting. All partitions minus swap are ext4, no LVM or other tricks. I could write a script to mount the internal flash drive only when updating the kernel, something like this (except not for EFI but for the internal flash):
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/EFISTUB#Using_systemd
But that would not be as "clean" as booting directly from /boot on the rootfs. When Googling I ran into someone flaming about CHAIN BOOTING A SECOND SYSLINUX ON A SOFTWARE RAID1 IS UTTERLY IMPOSSIBLE OH NO, but I haven't managed to find a definite "yes" or "no" to this question.

Apart from this one thing the system is running very well, has been for over a week. And I get Samba version 4, much like RAIDiator 6.x! ;)