RickNel
Veteran Member
[SORRY - I dropped this in the wrong forum area. Should be P2 vintage?]
I've salvaged from scrap an OEM touch-screen billing terminal based on Advantech 5820 miniATX. It boots to a login screen for a WinCE application on a CF card. The application and WinCE system are password-locked and I am not interested in cracking the application. In any case, I can read the CF card contents in other machines and see that it contains the tables for a client database of a local legal firm (with all data erased) and a range of network and comms drivers.
The problem is that I can't get to the operating system. WinCE lives partly on the BIOS EPROM, and the BIOS is also password-locked. Usual BIOS re-set techniques don't work. For that reason, I can't configure the current BIOS to boot from any other medium.
Advantech can't/won't help and referred me to the system integrator, who of course is long out of business. I have downloaded and flashed a supposedly generic BIOS for this model from Advantech. The flashed BIOS should boot by default to standard VGA, but doesn't.
I'm wondering whether the Advantech board has been locked in some two-factor manner that needs some specific arbitrary code from the OEM BIOS.
I don't have WinCE development tools and in any case if using WinCE would be stuck with having to build a custom BIOS as well.
My aim is to get the hardware to boot Linux from CF or IDE, eventually to work as a serial terminal to use with S100 machines..
I'm wondering whether anyone else has successfully re-set a board of this kind to work around firmware locks?
Rick
I've salvaged from scrap an OEM touch-screen billing terminal based on Advantech 5820 miniATX. It boots to a login screen for a WinCE application on a CF card. The application and WinCE system are password-locked and I am not interested in cracking the application. In any case, I can read the CF card contents in other machines and see that it contains the tables for a client database of a local legal firm (with all data erased) and a range of network and comms drivers.
The problem is that I can't get to the operating system. WinCE lives partly on the BIOS EPROM, and the BIOS is also password-locked. Usual BIOS re-set techniques don't work. For that reason, I can't configure the current BIOS to boot from any other medium.
Advantech can't/won't help and referred me to the system integrator, who of course is long out of business. I have downloaded and flashed a supposedly generic BIOS for this model from Advantech. The flashed BIOS should boot by default to standard VGA, but doesn't.
I'm wondering whether the Advantech board has been locked in some two-factor manner that needs some specific arbitrary code from the OEM BIOS.
I don't have WinCE development tools and in any case if using WinCE would be stuck with having to build a custom BIOS as well.
My aim is to get the hardware to boot Linux from CF or IDE, eventually to work as a serial terminal to use with S100 machines..
I'm wondering whether anyone else has successfully re-set a board of this kind to work around firmware locks?
Rick
Last edited: