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Warning: don't flash fastboot rom over your existing BIOS Before Reading this!!
Hello all,
I was over at viaarena and found this posting and thought it was extreamly usefull as far a what to expect after flashing the fastboot to your board. I have an MII board that I thought I fried but Im not so sure at this point. This article was posted by Toneloco12 Please see below:
yesterday i had a little success in booting from th CF-Slot on my MII-6000 Board but at the moment i am not shure if this is very useful. My intention is to run Windows XP embedded on the Board.
I startet with a 256Mb CF-Card connectet to the normal IDE Bus with a CF-to-IDE Adapter. In this case the Card act's as a normal Harddisk. This works very well but is not what i realy want. As you all, i want to boot from the onboard CF Adapter.
After that i decided to test the fastboot rom 2.03 and here is what i figured out.
Warning: don't flash fastboot rom over your existing BIOS
buy a new flash rom 39SF020A and flash the PCMCIA version of fastboot. In Germany you can get it from www.chip-service.de they can also flash it for you. Start with the debug version because it outputs debug info on the serial port. Not on the screen !
fastboot is not a bios. The screen keeps dark and without a proper os-image nothing happens. Fastboot is a kind of bootloader for os-images there is no user interaction. The boot-mechanism is completely different from a normal bios. It loads a kernel-image from the card to ram and jumps to this ram-image.
What i have testet:
1. Build a linux kernel with everything disabled except PCMCIA, GENERIC-IDE, VIA-IDE, RAMDISK, CONSOLE
2. convert the kernel image to an elf-image with mkelfimage (see docs in fastboot.zip)
3. prepare the cf-card. Format with ext2 or ext3 (ext3 not tested) and copy the elfimage to /boot/vmlinuz-m2
fastboot loads and executes the kernel. At the moment everything ends up in a kernel panic unable to mount root fs but i think thats a problem of the kernel. For the first try i was very satisfied.
Remaining Problems:
- fastboot only detects my lexar pro card. None of the sandisk cards are recognized and i don't know why because they work on the cf-to-ide adapter.
- what comes next ? If you want linux then you are nearly done but how boot xp embedded. I think the only way is that somebody has to write a loader for Windows SDI Ramboot Image (have a look at microsoft articles).
Ok, So there it is, Iv flashed the MII with the BIOS_R using the standard bios flashing utility. It seemed to flash fine, then asked to reboot, after rebooting I get not much at all. At this point all I can assume is that it is working and I just do not have a good boot image. Anyone have any experiance with this? Anyone know how I could verify if it is even posting? I have anouther via board I could swap the bios out with if I had too. Any suggestions would be appriciated.
Warning: don't flash fastboot rom over your existing BIOS Before Reading this!!
Not taking my own advice
!!
Linear Mode
