[Voyage-linux] Network Booting voyage on the wrap

[Uli Raich]

Hi all,
Since ~ 3 weeks I have a Wrap-2c board. I installed voyage and I found
the description for pxe booting on the wiki. Remote booting works fine
for me however nfs mounting the root file system still gives me some
trouble.
On the Wiki there is a last chapter: "Remaining issue on the Wrap" which
explains that you have to type "N" in order to start network booting.
I have found the solution and wanted to report on it:
Since the problem is in TinyBios and the BIOS flash of the wrap must be
reprogrammed this is a little risky. If you follow my desciption and you
end up with a corrupted BIOS and your board is completely dead, then
this is exclusively your problem! You have been warned!
This said, let's describe the method:
I found a wiki page named: "WRAP BIOS upgrade howto added to wiki" which
had a pointer to
http://pcengines/wbios111.zip a page where you can find an upgrade to
TinyBios-1.11. Since 1.11 is the version I have, this did not look very
promissing. However I learned there, that the flash image consists of 4
32kByte blocks. The first one is PC Engines' TinyBios, the second and
third are empty (0xff) and the last one is a copy of Etherboot. You also
find the options selected in Etherboot to produce the Etherboot flash
image. Analysing these options you see that the problems stems from a
badly selected boot media sequence. If instead of selecting
"BOOT_NOTHING" as the first boot device (this will in fact select the cf
card) you select BOOT_NIC (which is in fact the default) then wrap will
boot from the cf card if there is one inserted but immediately go to the
network if no cf card is there.
You can use http://rom-o-matic.net to produce the Etherboot rom image
very easily.
Then you must create a bootable msdos cf card (this is rather tricky and
I succeeded only with a cf card to IDE adapter and declaring the cf card
the main msdos disk c:).  Onto this card I put the content of
wbios111.zip. You have to rename the output of rom-o-matic to pxe.bin
and concatenate the 4 blocks using cat.bat found in wbios111. Finally I
used setbios, also found on wbios111 to re-flash the bios. For more info
have a look in the README of wbios111.
Now my wrap board behaves as expected.
Uli