Booting a Qube 2700 from hard disk

[aldeluis@usal.es]

Well, it's the better developemt for the Qube I've seen in a lot of
time... thank you for your work!!

I've followed Martin Michlmayr's intructions on how to boot Debian in a
Qube 2700 without serial console, connecting the hard disk to a host
computer, with  little modifications from the mips-debian list:

[partitioning]
mkfs.ext2 -r0 /dev/hdc1
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc2
mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdc6
mount /dev/hdc2 /mnt
mkdir /mnt/boot
mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt/boot
mkdir /mnt/proc /mnt/home
[download and verify base.tar.bz2]
cd /mnt
tar xvfj base.tar.bz2

When I install the hard disk to the qube, without network wire connected,
it sometimes shows the first menu list (CONSOLE STATE) and sometimes not.
The LCD sequence is:

Starting Up
CONSOLE STATE -> Console Off
BOOT SELECTION -> Disk (hda)
! UNIT BOOT FAILED !

Help?