Seems like this board has died off, and I am just getting started with the Touchpad device, first of all there were alot of great posts here that put me at where I am at today, I am going to add some of my findings to try to move this forward.
A little History on my project:
I installed a home theater in my house about 8 months ago and decided I needed some way of controlling the entire system. I found some great automation and remote software from Prmoixis (Girder & NetRemote). I needed a device to run the NetRemote software on and initially used an HP Ipaq 5555, however, the screen was way too small and to really use the device I had to create many layers of menus and screens. I decided I needed a better device something with a touchscreen. and pretty much an all-in-one type of device. I have messed around with other internet appliances before I converted a Virgin Web player to a regular slim-client type of PC, so discovering and modifying the Gateway touchpad was the way to go.
I found 2 of these on E-bay a few weeks back "Brand New in Box" for $60 each so I had to have them.
I have kept one in box just in case anything happened to the first one that I had dissassembled about 5 minutes after UPS brought it.
Some of the updates I have done so far...
I have kept the unused 32MB CF card as original image.
I soldered on the IDE Header, but decided I wanted to keep working with the CF
I removed the origianl Modem and HPNA card, I installed a 3Com mini pci modem/nic (3CN3AC1556) I built the custom cable that connects the card to the 4pin nic connector on the MB
I have used a 512MB SANDISK CF with windows 98, I have a 1GB PNY CF with Windows ME, and a 2GB PNY CF with Windows XP Pro.
The 512MB/Win98 works fine, except that when I select a movie to play from netremote Win98 crashes.
The 1GB/WinME was workign fine until I decided to do some updates which really messed up the registery, so I thought I would just pop the CF into the CF-IDE and reload WInME, well after I fdisked and formatted the card it would not boot in the touchpad, it would however boot the computer if I left it in the CF-IDE adapter... very odd I thought...
I concluded that the original format on the brand new card is what allowed it to boot the touchpad, and once I fdisked it and formated it I screwed up the original drive geometry and MBR. I knew this was the case when I bought the 2GB drive to try Windows XP, the brand new 2GB card accepted the OS, i basically just let it run until the first reboot and popped it out and moved it to the GCTP, which actaully booted--- to a point and then just hung. I restarted the GCTP and hit the MY AOL (F8) key to get to the boot options menu where I selected safe mode with command prompt so I could see what drivers it was loading and it hung right after "MUP.SYS" and I let it sit there about an hour and nothing...
I also worked a little bit with the PXE boot as the 3Com card supports this, the GCTP connected to the DHCP, got the File name it was supposed to load and the TFTP server kept coming back with a "transfer aborted" error "bad block" I need to double check the boot image I created for the network load and give that a try again
I also discovered a web site after doing a search to see about formating for a CF card that revived my 1GB CF so it will boot to DOS again on the GCTP.
I will add more as soon as I play around with it a little more
