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Home / I-Opener Areas / I-Opener Technical Stuff Will my flea market IO boot from a HD if it has phoned home? How do you tell if an IO has phoned home and if it will still boot from a hard drive?

Will my flea market IO boot from a HD if it has phoned home? (modified 0 times) Q000 Profile I heard about the IO hack early on, but then the price jumped to $400 so I thought I missed out. Then l spotted one at a flea market last week and $65 later I was a proud V1 I-Owner. Spent the last week reading through this great board, my thanks to all who have contributed. I have a 2.5 drive to use with it and plan to get a mounting kit from badflash.com, but I would like to know if I should order a new BIOS at the same time. My understanding is that a new V1 will boot from a HD no problem, but if it phoned home after the hack became well known, the BIOS was updated to cripple the HD boot and must be replaced. My IO looks new, but it had been taken out of the box. If it did phone home, maybe it was before the bad update. How can I tell if I need to replace my BIOS? CTL+ALT ESC gets me into SETUP. Holding TAB while booting brings up the boot screen that tells me: Award Modular Bios v4.51PC 10/01/1999-VP4-686-IPC_VIAC-00 A login: prompt shows eventually but the I-Opener screen takes over before I can do much. Holding down ESC and pressing 4 repeatedly at the when the fat pointer shows does nothing. Any insights or suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks, -Q 08-19-2001 20:00:00

RE:Will my flea market IO boot from a HD if it has phoned home? (modified 0 times) laserfan Profile I have a v1 IO that was in service w/Netpliance for nearly 2 years, until this spring when I hacked it to run W98SE. No new BIOS needed in my case! Sounds like you have a "find" at $65. I put in a HD, bracket, WinChip2, and USB Ethernet dongle for around $175 or so, which I do not consider "cheap", but I am very pleased w/the result. As I have said here before this is now my email & surfing machine, and my favorite computer out of amost a half-dozen. Good luck. 08-20-2001 04:44:39

RE:Will my flea market IO boot from a HD if it has phoned home? (modified 0 times) jbarr Profile I am definatly NOT an i-Opener expert, but I think you need go just one small step further: You said that CTRL+ALT+ESC gets you the setup. As I understand it, this is the first HUGE step. Once you are in setup, select (I believe) the second selection on the left. Somewhere in that screen is the "boot order". Highlight it and press page up or page down to change the values. By default, the I-Opener boots from "D", the SanDisk FLASH disk. Setting the boot order to boot from "C" will let you boot from a connected hard drive. Should be as simple as that... Of course, you will need to connect a bootable hard drive, but that's another story. Oh, one tip: don't forget to install a version of WinZip (assuming a Windows install) or some unzipping program or you may not be able to access the downloaded files. Also make sure you put as much of the OS setup files on the HD as you can because you do not have a CD drive to later install from. And if you can get a USB Ethernet connector, it's well worth the money. Once configured, you never need to remove the HD again to install new stuff. This stuff may seem obvious, but it's not always, and can definatly save some headaches in the future! 08-20-2001 08:46:38

Thanks for the response laserfan (modified 0 times) Q000 Profile >I have a v1 IO that was in service w/Netpliance for nearly 2 years, until this spring when I hacked it to run W98SE. No new BIOS needed in my case! That is good to hear, it looks like I can save $10. > Sounds like you have a "find" at $65. I thought so when I saw it. The price started at $75 and I probably could have gotten it for $55 or $60 but as soon as I heard $65 I decided to quit screwing around and pull out my wallet before it disappeared. Then as I was driving away I realized that I had no Idea if it worked or was hopelessly broken, or if it had been crippled to the point that it couldn’t be used with anything but a bad overpriced ISP. Looks like I got lucky and it is everything I hoped it would be. > I put in a HD, bracket, WinChip2, and USB Ethernet dongle for around $175 or so, which I do not consider "cheap" I plan I doing about the same with mine, but I have to be careful or I’ll end up spending twice what a comparable laptop would cost. Thanks, -Q 08-21-2001 22:07:38

Thanks for the tiips jbarr (modified 0 times) Q000 Profile Thanks for the tiips jbarr, I wondered if there was a trick to getting an IO to boot from a HD instead of the flash drive, but no one said anything in the FAQs or all the messages I’ve read so I assumed the IO would find it automatically. You probably saved me a lot of time and head scratching. Once I get it to boot from a HD, I will probably add a USB 802.11b with a directional antenna so I can have Ethernet and broad band internet from the coffee house down the street. -Q I hide my e address from spam bots. My email is ps111(at)home.com Replace (at) with @ to email me. 08-21-2001 22:31:08

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