New I/O Owner here is my recipe for a successfull hack of the v4. Sorry I forgot to note the date on the box. I am at work now, so have no access. I bought it from CC 3 days ago, so that should give you an idea.
1. break seal, open box
2. power up with iop keyboard, cannot get into bios
3.use Y splitter, connect regulart keyboard to MOUSE connector of the Y splitter. Though I haven't tried, I am sure connecting a keyboard without a Y splitter will not work.
4. connect a 260 MB toshiba (MK1724, bought from comp geeks) to a regular PC running linux.
5. the 260MB HDD did not have any jumpers, so I had to connect it as secondary master (let my PC auto detect it)
6. fdisk /dev/hdc (may be different on your machine, use dmesg to find out), go to expert mode (option x), set cylinders/heads/sectors to 490/2/32, write to disk and exit
7. gunzip iop_v2_sandisk_dump (downloaded from #########.com) on local disk
8. dd if=iop_v2_sandisk_dump of=/dev/hdc
this is important, follow carefully
9. connect HDD to iop, boot and get into bios setup (ctrl-alt-esc).
10. set drive D to 15-32-0-489-LBA, 490/2/32 setting did not work for me.
11. set drive C to none
12. set boot sequence to 'C only'.
13. save settings and exit.
14. for me the iop gave me a blank screen, all I had to do was power cycle (do not use the iop power button, instead disconnect power and reconnect)
15. power up iop and keep pressing tab (this is optional), it will show you the bios messages
16. as the iop starts up you will first see a small arrow on the top left of the screen, after a while it changes to a bigger arrow.
17. at this time hold Esc and press keep pressing 4 till you see a shell with a prompt (pressing 4 four times will suffice, if you pressed them more than necessary you will see them on the shell prompt, no harm, just use backspace)
18. you have to be fast here, type the following command
vi /etc/passwd
then move cursor to the 'x' on the line where you see 'root'. press x to delete it. next type the following commands
:w! (colon is not a typo here)
q
19. you are now back to the shell prompt, now type
/app/stop-apps
you should have done all this as fast as you can, do not stare at the screen, reading everything.
20. now after a few seconds the blue screen of the iop welcome will disappear and you will see a blank screen, hit enter, you will get a login prompt, type root and hit enter (if it asks for a password hit enter again).
21. you now have root shell and you can relax and do things at your own pace
22. type the following
cd /app/ztest
./qnxflash -w bios_image_256k.bin
it will warn you, blah blah, say yes, now be very careful here. if it says that the flashing was NOT successfull (display sorry!) then DO NOT power off or reset
23. for my 1st iop the flash was an immediate success not for the second one and for my friend's iop. on my friend's iop we had to press the BIOS chip and try again, success. on my second iop I did the following before a successful flash
./qnxflash -r zzz
(zzz is the name of the file to write to)
./qnxflash -v zzz
./qnxflash -w bios_image_256k.bin
success...then I verified the write with a
./qnxflash -v bios_image_256k.bin
everything was fine. if you still do not have a successful flash, keep trying, I suspect it has something to with timing of the write or something that I do not understand, but keep trying. one guy reported trying 15 times. if you are still unable to do it, then badflash is an alternative.
24. at this point the flash of the bios is complete, next time you boot you should see the date (hit tab at boot time) as 10-1-99.
25. now to install jailbait on the sandisk. the qnxflash seemed to have messed my MBR, so when I tried installing linux, or jailbait image on my 260Mb HDD, it would not boot (lilo would not fix it either). the only way it worked for me was to install Win 98 (just the command.com, use format C: /s) and then use fdisk /mbr). it is important to note that you should be able to boot off the HDD using a regular PC, otherwise it is most unlikely that the iop will boot from it either. do not forget to copy dolly and the jailbait distribution (jailbait.sourceforge.net) to the HDD before you copy jailbait.
26. OK now connect HDD to iop, make it auto detect both drives, boot sequece 'C only'.
27. iop will boot and you will have the friendly DOS prompt, type the following command
dolly jailbait.img hd129: (see the colon?)
the first time you run dolly it will ask you for name, telephone blah blah then at the password prompt enter 'trial'. that is it, dolly will copy jailbait onto the sandisk. optionally you may want to save a copy of the original sandisk image on to your HDD, see dolly options.
28. now reboot, change bios sequence to 'D,A, SCSI', and you have jailbait.
29. the first time jailbait is run it will ask you for various information for configuring the network, ppp etc..I have successfully used a D-Link DSB 650tx USB ethernet adaptor (just say no to questions regarding kawasaki USB etc.) incidentally D-Link is offering a $20 mail-in rebate, so the final price would be just $25.
30. that is it then, wish you good luck, hope
that you do not have to spend $20 on badflash, you can instead use it towards the USB adapter.