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Home / I-Opener Areas / I-Opener General Posts IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? ooggi boogie boo

IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) parasyght Profile | Email I bought an iopener from a guy whom didnt want his anymore and hadnt used it for a while, that was about 3 months ago( my second iop to hack). I attempted to flash the bios using the hard drive method, but kept getting a boot disk failure. Is this because it has updated its self? Has anyone else had this problem. One other thing that may have something to do with it, fdisk keeps reporting 13% 13% - 67% for the partition sizes. I reread the threads which addressed this issue but it seems once anybody got fdisk to read the right size they never posted how they fixed it. Ive repartitioned with dolly about 10 times without any luck getting fdisk to read the 2% 2% - 12%. I dont remember if i had ever got the fdisk to read the right partition size on my other iopener, which i used the hard drive to flash the bios. 02-22-2001 17:26:43

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) mrblack51 Profile I had a similar problem on my v4. What fixed it was checking that the drive was set to NORMAL in bios and using 490/2/32 for the settings on the system that formatted it and dolly'd it. Then on the iopener, doing the same, with percomp 65535 and landing zone 489. Do a search for info and you will find it. 02-22-2001 17:57:31

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) parasyght Profile | Email did you also let your io call home? How did you format your drive when you had the geometry set to 490/2/32 normal? The drive shouldnt show up in dos, therefore you couldnt have formated it unless you had a primary dos partition on it.. I would have to set my drive to auto in the bios, let it boot to dos, put a primary dos partition on it with fdisk, then format it, and then delet the partition with fdisk. After that i would have to set the geometry to 490/2/32. wait. did you put a primary dos partion on the drive with 490/2/32 and format it, then ran dolly on it? if so, did dolly remove the primary dos partion and replace it with the qnx(iopener) partitions? My problem is the partition percentage or the fact my iopener called home. 02-22-2001 18:32:38

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) starfish Profile Forget That it Called Home. With FDISK, DELETE ALL Partitions. Then DOLLY. Then Check Partitions with FDISK Again. Good Luck ! * StarFish * 02-22-2001 18:51:24

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) parasyght Profile | Email What the #### are you taling about starfish. Every thread ive read, thats all you say "do it over, wahh." Why would the % change out of the blue? after doing it over and over. That makes no sense. what does,"Forget That it Called Home" mean? This io was not just pulled out of the box. Belive it or not, i sold it to a customer at work (####ty city) when they where 99dollars, and he decided he didnt want it after a couple of months so i bought back from him for $70. So i can not "forget that it called home," the fact that it has could determine if i have to use my hacked io to flash it or not. I dont want to risk breaking the bios socket or getting a bad flash, unless i have to. So im trying to find out if i can flash the bios with the hard drive trick? even though it has been used with the netpliance service for some time. 02-22-2001 23:13:21

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) Wild_Pencil Profile | Email if it's not a V5, you can use the hard-drive method. Personally, I hate using Dolly. I've got Linux boxes with removable HD bays, so I just popped in a spare hard-drive and used dd to dump the image (available on #########) to the hard-drive. No muss, no fuss -- hook up the drive to the IO and off it went. If you've got problems, check Master/Slave setting on the hard-drive.. and set the BIOS to ignore the 2nd hard drive (D: = "None"). If the BIOS sees both the hard-drive and the Sandisk, it'll give you the invalid boot disk message. Same for any disk/partitioning scheme that deviates from the original Sandisk's scheme. -WP 02-22-2001 23:29:26

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) starfish Profile Dude, Can You Show me Any Post Where Someone Proved there was a Difference with one that called Home ? I Forget. But I Know everyone I Helped & My Own Problems were caused by Not Having a CLEAN Hard Drive. I don't Know How else to say it. It Could be a C/H/S Problem, but I can't remember any Proof That Calling Home ever Changed a BIOS. A Change to The SANDISK/SUNDISK doesn't matter for this HACK. You Are Tricking The BIOS into Seeing the Hard Drive as the SANDISK. That is Why The %s Must Be Right ! This is Just My Answer. If There Are More Answers, Wait & You Will See Them ! Hopefully Before We See The IMod3 Kits * StarFish * 02-22-2001 23:35:11

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) parasyght Profile | Email That is much better answer than, just telling me to do it again. That is great that the io doesnt flash its own bios, that means that i should be able to get the hard drive running. THis also tells me that it is nessary to have the geometry on the hd set perfectly to fool the io. THank you, i will keep trying to get the % to come out right, although on my new comp, setting the c/h/s to 490/2/32 reads 16 megs in bios, but fdisk says 32, and dolly locks it up. I have no idea why. anyone else have this problem?? I have to use an older computer to dolly, or a dos window, is the dos window ok?? 02-23-2001 00:20:33

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) mrblack51 Profile You must set the geometry properly in bios unless you have a 16mb drive that you want to use. since that probably isnt the case, you have to set the geometry to 490/2/32 manually, and use normal and NOT LBA. it took me a few tries, but it did work. make sure you fdisk the drive so there are no partitions, and use dolly or dd on it. oh yeah, the iopener i did was a v4, and it was used with the iopener service for some length of time before i got it (had past owners email still on it) 02-23-2001 00:59:36

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) cyrixone Profile Yes, calling Netpliance's service can make an I-Opener "unflashable". Proof? I've used the same hard drive to flash other virgin I-Openers with no problem... My findings prompted me to write this: http://www.linux-hacker.net/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/UltraBoard.pl?Action=ShowPost&Board=technical&Post=1923&Idle=0&Sort=0&Order=Descend&Page=0&Session= You're going to have to remove the epoxy. I know it sucks, I know it's no fun... Hey, life isn't fair. ...BTW, this is the first post I've made to this BBS on an iMac that I got as a trade for one of my old PCs. Add one real pointing device (Logitech trackman marble USB, of course), a SODIMM from an upgraded I-Opener, update to OS 8.6, installed copy of Kaleidoscope (Mac version of Windowblinds, can make MacOS less UGLY) and plugged it into my 16 port 10BT hub... Not a bad little system for web browsing and running AIM. Now if Apple could get the price down to the magic $99, they could probably sell a whole $hitload :) 02-23-2001 02:23:53

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) 02U2 Profile Perhaps Badflash still has a few 28f020-90 (12v) Flash chips left.... With 12v chip don't have to worry about Bios being mysteriously reflashed while installed in i-Opener... I was lucky and managed to get about 8 chips last April during the great shortages. Gee... it's been almost a year since this fad started..... 02-23-2001 03:13:26

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) BadFlash Profile | Email Yea, that is amazing to me that it has been nearly a year since the IOPENER community put BadFlash.com on the map! I no longer carry 12 flash chips. They are virtually unobtainable. Fortunately NPLI is no longer doing the flash over the internet. Shortly after I got my first V4 I flashed the bios to V1 and used the NPLI service for a full 3 months connecting daily. My bios was never changed. One thing you don't want to do is ever to kill power to the Io in the critical period during boot up during the period when the drives are being detected and the time the boot sequence actually starts. A block of the bios called ESCD gets updated then and killing power in the midle of that can prevent booting without a bios re-flash. 02-23-2001 09:26:33

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) Texman Profile Flashable BIOS' are just that...flashable. If someone updates a BIOS to not allow a 'hacker' to get into the system, then a downgraded BIOS flash will correct the problem. If you can find an older version of you BIOS on the internet, then just flash it with that. For example, if you have a V5 IO that has been 'write protected', the solution would be to download an older version of the BIOS, obtain the flash utility, and downgrade the BIOS. 02-24-2001 00:26:17

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) cyrixone Profile By "unflashable", I didn't mean you could never flash the chip again - I meant the well-documented "boot a V1/V2 QNX image on hard drive and run qnxflash" hack will not work on I-Openers that have been recently used with Netpliance's sevice and updated their software. 02-24-2001 04:20:05

RE:IO calling home, does it affect the bios flashing from a hard drive? (modified 0 times) parasyght Profile | Email I just finished hot flashing my bios. I use my already flashed io which i flashed with hd method. IT took a couple of tries before it took. 02-25-2001 14:57:26

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