The Netvoyager has a standard BIOS. Hit the DEL key on power-up to enter the setup screens. My LX1010 was password protected. The default password is 554502.
The BIOS Screen identifies itself as AMIBIOS HIFLEX SETUP UTILITY - VERSION 1.54
The Boot options appear to be IDE-0 or Disabled.
On the Advanced CMOS Setup screen is an additional option: Boot ROM function. If you enable this the system will attempt to boot from the network. Hitting Shift/TAB let's you choose either PXE (p key) or RLP (r key). My PXE server is not in one piece at the moment so I haven't checked this method of alternative booting.
The LX1010 runs Netvoyager's 'Lithium' operating system. Their website does say:
Netvoyager has two versions of the Thin Client firmware, Lithium and PhoenixOS. PhoenixOS is the latest firmware offering and Lithium is the legacy firmware. Development on the Lithium firmware stopped in 2004. Lithium support ends January 2009. There is an upgrade path for some products that operate the Lithium firmware. PhoenixOS launched in 2005 and will continue to be developed until 2010.
As with all of Netvoyager's such offerings I think there is no easy way to use these without being in possession of the administrator password.
From Netvoyager's support forums Re: Lost LX1010 Administrator password:
That depends on the version of the OS you have. If you are indeed using the Lithium OS, then I am afraid that all you can do is send it back to us to reset it to factory defaults. Please contact us on support@netvoyager.co.uk to discuss the formalities, shipping etc...
On the other hand if the OS has been upgraded to Phoenix, then you are in luck.....
If you ever lose the administrator password on the Phoenix OS, there is a way to set a new password without resetting the unit to factory default.
Restart the unit, press F2 during boot, approximately when the splash screen progress bar is half filled. You will end up in the rescue manager. There you will find a security token. Send it to us, or call us and we will send you a matching password. After that re-enter a new password, and you are good to go.
If you've just acquired the Netvoyager and have no interest in what's on there you can install a fresh firmware image from the Netvoyager website. At the time of writing the instructions on how to create a bootable USB pen drive are here along with images of the rescue files. You can do this either from a Linux system or Windows XP. However I don't know what planet the guy who wrote the rescue instructions lives on. The Netvoyager LX-1010s in my possession have NO provision for booting from USB that I can find.
All is not lost....
As an alternative I tried booting the rescue pen drive on the IGEL M300C as that had similar hardware. That was fine and I found I had a version of Puppy Linux running. I then switched off, dismantled the LX-1010, and transferred the DOM across to the M300C. Next I rebooted and ran the firmware upgrade application. Warning: This immediately went ahead and reformatted/rewrote /dev/hda. There was NO warning. This is no problem if you are running on an LX-1010 but potentially hazardous if you've booted the pen drive on alternative hardware just to see what's there and what it does.
Once the operation was complete I moved the DOM back to the LX-1010 and found I had a standard Netvoyager thin client with no administrator password set.
Note: I have no idea how stripped-down the version of linux is on the pen drive and so how close the hardware it runs on has to be to the LX-1010.
Any comments? email me. Last update June 2011