Completely wiping a CMOS widget

I have been having difficulty with getting my PandaBoard ES to boot with recent ROM images for a while now.

Gets to the desktop and then complains about a “Filer_run not being found”

As an experiment I removed the CMOS widget off the board and now it booted all the way!

I have tried to re-write the CMOS by using the tool available from R-Comp after hot plugging the widget in and also not using the widget at all (generating a CMOS file in the FAT partition of the SD-Card)

No matter what – it just doesn’t work.

So what needs to be done is to somehow return the widget to a blank state, if of course, the widget isn’t knackered.

Any ideas?

Of course in other news this was all done so I could get SDFS working on the PandaBoard – using a Sandisk Extreme Pro SD-Card (class 10, 95MB/s (according to the label) the performance is slightly mind blowing :-)

So what needs to be done is to somehow return the widget to a blank state

Just hold down the delete key on power up until start banner appears. There is another (cheeky) way involving intentionally writing over the checksum byte, but try the user-guide-documented way first!

The reason I asked is because shift or delete power ons are troublesome on newer hardware / ROM version.

However I thought I would give it a bash and…

This ROM (24/07) is supporting a wired keyboard doing both shift and delete power ons so I was able to wipe the CMOS.

So that is one problem sorted :-)

Now to try and work out what has happened to the video drivers so that my HDMI KVM no longer works… :-(

Even though this is (again) an old post others might benefit when facing this particular brick wall. Like Keith I couldn’t get past the filer_boot error message via *desktop after fitting the widget. To my surprise however I could *dir <path to !CMOStool> and then type *!CMOStool which brought up a minimal desktop with CMOStool running. Clicked the “load cmos” button which overwrote the incompatible settings with my previously saved CMOS file. Another re-boot and everything’s fine.