Reviving a brick

[janrinze]

Sorry for top-posting, has this Netwinder been revived yet?

Jan Rinze.

On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 18:24 -0500, Ralph Siemsen wrote:
> Hi Ben,
> 
> On Sat, Feb 06, 2010 at 09:40:41AM +1100, Ben Williamson wrote:
> > 
> > I dusted off a Netwinder DM that's been idle for about a year. The front
> > panel LED comes on steady and the disk and fan spin up, but no other signs
> > of life. No keyboard LED, no video, no beep.
> 
> Odd, usually the problem is the hard disk won't spin up, drawing too
> much current and preventing the rest from working.  Sounds like this is
> not the case here.  Note, there is no beep on the ARM netwinder.
> 
> You could try the serial port, see if you see any output there.  If the
> first block of flash is intact, it is possible to serially load a kernel
> and then recover the rest of the firmware.
> 
> I'd also suggest checking the power supply - should be 12V 1A, although
> some of the early ones went out with 9V ones (mostly to Europe, AFAIK).
> 
> > I'm sure this box booted last time I got it out about a year ago, and I
> > don't think I've done anything silly with it since then. Is it really
> > possible that the flash contents has just decayed over time? It would be >
> > 10yrs since the flash was written.
> 
> I suppose anything is possible, but I've never seen that happen.
> 
> > Anyway, any advice on reviving the brick? Parallel port JTAG hackery is an
> > option, but I've no idea where to start for JTAG driver software or for
> > flash images to download.
> 
> I have a very homebrew JTAG cable and highly fragile software, dating back
> to the Corel days.  I tried to get OpenOCD working a while ago, didn't
> make too much progress.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ralph
> 
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