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Netvoyager LX-1010: Firmware 

BIOS

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. However if you plug in a USB pen drive before switching on it will also appear in this list.

Alternatively pressing F11 as the system starts up will bring up the boot menu and let you select the pen drive at this point in time.

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.

Firmware

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.

Reimage

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.

When I first explored this I obviously had a 'Senior Moment' as I wrote:

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.

It will boot from USB - you just have to have the pen drive plugged in in order for it to appear on the boot screens! For a one-off boot hitting F11 as the system starts up will let you select which device you boot from.

Booting from a Pen Drive

My first attempts to boot from a pen drive failed. For example Syslinux complained about not being able to find any of its menu files. I hazarded a guess as to why this was and tried formatting the pen drive in USB-ZIP format. This worked. In this context the 'USB-ZIP' format is rather lax. I don't know how lax but subsequently all I did was take a 4GB pen drive,

  • use fdisk to create a standard partition table.
  • create a single 200MB partition as partition 1.
  • format it as FAT16.
  • Use LiLi to put Tiny Core 7.0 on it.

I made no attempt to force the geometry to the old Zip format nor did I use fourth entry in the partition table.

i.e. it just expects to find a partition table at the start of the pen drive.

I leave it to you to determine whether there are any restrictions on the partition size or types of file systems.

 


Any comments? email me.    Last update May 2016