thermoptic

Well, I rewired for the 24-bit color mode on the shorter Digital View LVDS cable but no luck. I quadruple checked the wiring and I probed every pin on the LCD's JAE connector. All signal levels are valid!

With all the delays I'm having, I decided to drop Gentoo and buy Win XP. The OEM version was under $140 on NewEgg. I decided to move forward with the install. Perhaps I need VIA video drivers installed to tell the chipset that it should talk 24-bit and not 18-bit color? This should be handled at the LVDS-07 level, but, maybe not?

I decided to purchase a WD Scorpio WD1600BEVS 160GB 5400 RPM SATA 150 HDD to meet the WinXP OEM requirement. This doubled the size of my current HDD, so I can setup a dual-boot to one day return to Linux.

Well, it turns out you need a floppy to load the VIA RAID drivers for the SATA HDD, but the EPIA EN15000G doesn't have a floppy. Not to fear, as I have an Iomega USB floppy. I soon learned that while you can hit <F6> and direct the Win XP installer to locate the SATA RAID driver, you cannot access the USB floppy later on in the install process after Win XP starts and ditches the boot-up BIOS settings. I was stuck with Win XP installer unable to find the floppy.

I learned that the Iomega USB Floppy is actually an OEM Citizen X1 USB Floppy driver. The driver INF file tells Win XP to use the usbstor.sys driver for the appropriate Vendor ID (VID) and Product ID (PID). I thought about creating my own Citizen USB driver disk with a TXTSETUP.OEM file, but I was worried about Win XP knowing how to locate the device. I Googled and found that you can add a single line to the VIA SATA RAID TXTSETUP.OEM file so that it will look for the viaraid.sys file on the USB floppy. Here is the source link:

http://www.msfn.org/board/F6-Driver-...py-t82711.html

I added the following line:


Windows XP is now installing to the SATA drive! Now, back to the regularly scheduled LVDS color depth problem.