A way of flashing the ROM without RaQ-OS

[ceelight]

Disclaimer: The below descriped way of flashing a ROM is not the one you should prefer! It can, if flashing fails, completely destroy your device. So, please be warned!

I have two nice, but old, RaQ3 with very old ROM version 2.3.0 and my RaQ550 recovery CD was unable to update the ROM. I also do not have a already installed RaQ-OS. So I searched for a way to update the ROM without OS and found my way here -> http://www.osoffice.co.uk/romupdate.html (scroll to the last point of this page).

I made it with both RaQs without any problem.

But again, if you're unsure - let it be!

Cheers
Cee

[Davesworld]

You can also flash the rom with the Strongbolt 1.x CD booted to a machine and a crossover cable connected. No os needed there either and you do get confirmation. Jeff Walter (the main Cobalt 2.6 kernel patch writer) has an excellent and very detailed tutorial on flashing via serial console.

http://wiki.parvi.org/index.php/ROM_Flash_without_OS_Guide

[ceelight]

Right, I saw this one too. It's the same proceeding.

My situation was a bit different . I only had a notebook and the RaQs, because all my other PCs are still packed in some cardboard boxes in the garage because we were moving. Also the CD device of the notebook is not working anymore.

So I decided to try it with the RaQ550 restore CD, VirtualBox and a bridged network. This was working quite well after modprobe the pcnet32. But the restore CD couldn't upgrade the ROM. Then I modified the iso with the bigger flashtool and the new rom-file, booted again, but no success. Always getting an error if I tried to flash. So I was searching the internet and found both HowTos. But my Linux wasn't able to keep the screen open and to send the rom through the serial cable (/dev/ttyS0 busy). OK, next try. In the screen session I got to the point "dl_kernel", stopped the screen session and sent the rom to ttyS0. After getting the prompt back I opened screen again and voila. Some hard minutes to wait I can tell you.

Anyways, I got both RaQs flashed. 

[Davesworld]

If you do it over the serial console, once you erase the eeprom, everything has to be done perfectly at this point and you get no feedback if you were successful or not. Rom replacement is 75 dollars US on this side of the pond.

One lesser known way to experiment with roms rather that try to find all the source code (you can't build one with what is posted at sourceforge as some parts are missing) is to use the romutilities from Sourceforge, extract the rom into it's separate parts and put a different bzipped kernel in and reassemble. I tried to replace the kernel with 2.4.37 with the exact configuration they used on the 2.4.25 kernel in 2.10.3 for starters and then I replaced eepro100 with the patched e100 driver, removed XTR support and added usb storage support.

When reassembling the rom, the kernel fit with 4KB room left in the romfs. The main difference between an os kernel and the rom kernel is that you enable the cobalt bootloader in the patched kernel whereas in the os, you do not and what little you have is in the kernel, no modules. Luckily you do not mess with the rom monitor which is what you use when you netboot and all that. You can still download the kernel via serial and upload via serial the original vmlinux.bz2 from the 2.10.3 rom as it was.

I was not successful getting my kernel to start in the rom. The rom monitor must be using a different or older bzip2 method, it could not unbzip2 it is all but I still had the rom monitor and menu to play with. I was able to make the kernel support usb storage but like i mentioned, it used up almost all the romfs space. Not sure how much if any of the romfs has to be free on top of the kernel either. The original vmlinux.bz2 in the rom is under 700KB. I also need to do a kernel with eepro100 support and compare module sizes between it and the e100, whichever is smaller would be the one to use. The bottom line is that it fit in the romfs and the bzipped rom monitor had no trouble being unbzip2ed and running.