Neoware CA10: Firmware 

• Hardware
• Firmware
• Linux

BIOS

The Neoware CA10 has a standard PC Award BIOS - hit the DEL key on power up to get into it.

The boot options are

• Floppy
• LS120
• HDD-0
• SCSI
• CDROM
• HDD-1
• ZIP100
• USB-FDD
• USB-ZIP
• USB-CDROM
• USB-HDD
• LAN

There is a USB pen-drive creation tool in Tinycore Linux. I had previously used this to make a bootable pen-drive that I used quite happily with the Fujitsu Siemens A250 so....

I set the "First Boot Device" to USB-HDD and the "Second Boot Device" to Disabled, plugged the pen drive in and booted the CA10. This worked perfectly - unlike my experience with the CA16.

Firmware

My CA10 is running Windows CE 5.0 (Neoware Rev 8.0.3 (Dec29 2005))

Appliance Password

In Windows CE there is an option to set an Appliance Password. If one is set you cannot make any changes to the system configuration without providing it. You also may be prevented from actually viewing any of the configuration information.

If an unknown password is set this obviously is a barrier to you using the standard firmware. You need to reset it. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any simple key combination to do this but there is a relatively easy route you can take. In the description below you may need to adjust some things to match the Linux distribution you use. In my case I'm using Tiny Core and the DOM appears as sda.

1. First create a bootable USB pen drive with a Linux distribution on it. (There is a simple guide here). I happened to have a USB drive with Tiny Core 4.1 on it and so used that.
2. Ensure the CA10 BIOS is set up to boot from a USB drive. (I had USB-HDD as the first boot device and USB-ZIP as the second boot device).
3. Boot into Linux and open a console. In my example I opened a command console once I'd booted into the Tiny Core desktop.
4. To save time you might as well switch to being root.

   $ sudo su
   #

5. Mount the DOM with the Windows CE file system and cd into it:

   # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
   # cd /mnt/sda1
   #

6. Delete or rename the file system.hv:

   # mv system.hv system.hv.old
   #

7. Navigate to Profiles/default:

   # cd Profiles/default
   #

8. Delete or rename the file user.hv:

   # mv user.hv user.hv.old
   #

9. Reboot.

That should do it. The .hv files are 'hive' files that contain the system configuration data. Windows CE will recreate these with some default entries when it next starts up.