Booting a (possibly unsupported) development board
I've got a small number of KAMIO-2701 development boards manufactured by
IEI, these are based on a PXA270. I'm hoping to be able to reserve at
least one to help out a couple of deserving open-source compiler projects.
Unfortunately, these boards arrived with Windows CE. The manufacturer
doesn't make alternative media available for download, a board with
Linux (i.e. KAMIO-2702) would cost about $170 and the Linux development
kit about $500. The UK distributor rubbed salt into the wound by
emphasising that Linux was sold unsupported and that if I knew what was
good for me I'd use Windows.
Windows CE, or in principle Linux, boots from a 128Mb CF device. Looking
at the CE one I can see a PC-like boot sector with partition table and a
FAT-16 filesystem, fdisk warns me that this does not extend to the end
of the disc. The filesystem contains a plausible boot sector identified
as "Microsoft Windows CE BIOS Bootloader" which appears to want to
transfer control to a file called "bldr" in the root directory where
there is also a boot.ini.
If I try booting a CF device prepared for an NSLU2 ("Slug") the on-board
loader identifies itself as "Microsoft Windows CE Ethernet Bootloader
[...] ICPEMS WinCE Bootloader 1.7 for the HMI270" (build dates chopped
out of that) but fails with "Invalid MBR signature 0". Looking at the
boot sectors suggests that the code immediately preceding the boot
sector is rather simpler than that originally supplied and the
filesystem boot sector is blank.
Can anybody tell me what I need to make the disc and filesystem
bootable? Allowing that the on-board boot code looks very PC-like does
ARM have something directly equivalent to PC-linux LILO or SILO for the
SPARC, or is the only option to configure U-Boot or RedBoot and flash it
onto the board?
I've done limited time on ARM but am not without experience on other
platforms. I don't mind building kernels or fiddling around with dd, I
don't have JTAG capability at present.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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