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Repurpose an Advantech 5820 micro-ATX

RickNel

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Joined
Apr 24, 2009
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Location
Canberra, Australia
[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
 
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I had a problem similar to this about 5 years ago with an AMD 50x15 computer, which has similar specs to your motherboard.

It had Windows CE on it and AMD locked it down so the machine was effectively useless since nobody supports Windows CE. Fortunately, I found this page which may help you:

http://mozy.org/amd-pic/

This link has the unlocked BIOS and tools for the 50x15, which MIGHT work on your motherboard since they use the same chipset AFAIK. Use at your own risk though, I can't guarantee it won't brick your motherboard. You may want to try dumping the BIOS with a flash tool if possible.

http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=12940

Win CE doesn't reside on the BIOS, the BIOS just has locks on it that prevent it from booting to anything other than Win CE.

But assuming you get the motherboard unlocked, it will still be effectively useless due to the crippled CPU. The AMD Geode it uses is basically a die-shrunk Cyrix 486 running at 266-400 MHz (depending on the model.) But despite the high clock speed, it being a 486 class processor makes it unable to run Windows beyond XP or any Linux distribution or other OS which targets a 586/686 class processor (AMD k5/K6, Pentium, etc.) And despite the high clock speed, the CPU isn't all that great because of the slow cache (think it only has 64 kB of L2 which isn't much faster than FPM SIMM memory.)
 
Thanks Gigabyte, those links are good. I won't risk the original BIOS chip - I can burn alternative BIOS and substitute.
Performance is not an issue for me. I don't plan using it for anything more than a serial terminal, though I hope it can be smart enough to configure. Getting a driver up for the touch screen would be nice, but even fall-back VGA would be good enough for my purpose.

On back burner for the time being.
Rick
 
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