[U-Boot] Booting into winCE .nb0 without access to source files

[Michael Newton]

Hi,


I have an awkward situation, short of it is we have a custom i.MX53 board, the nk.nb0 and eboot.nb0 files to boot into windows (with no source code), and an Ubuntu VM with the source code and compiled files of uboot from august 2009 (as well as some flavour of linux that I'm not 100% sure on). I need to figure out a way to boot into either the nk.nb0 or eboot.nb0 so that we can run our software.


Longer versions is that before I got to this company, they were buying an i.MX53 board from a 3rd party, and using that to assemble our product. When that 3rd party went out of business, my company bought the design and rights to it so that we could manufacture our own boards to sell and maintain our product. For some reason, we've had a very high rate of failure on the boards we've had manufactured, where 50%+ fail to do anything when powered on with the windows files and not even a single line appears on the com terminal link we use to debug (my theory is something on the board doesn't allow for enough current/voltage during start up, so it just hangs if it's below a certain threshold due to manufacturing variances). While going through some of the files we got from the other company, I found an Ubuntu VM image that contained uboot and a version of linux, which will boot the "dead" boards perfectly fine.


Based on my research so far, I am hopeful that I may be able to have uboot start either eboot.nb0 or nk.nb0, and it won't crash the hardware in the process (we don't have the resources to do more in depth troubleshooting of the board design or re-write our software for the linux version).


When I boot into winCE on the working boards, I get this:


Copying NK image to RAM addresss 0xa0200000

and

Jumping to image at 0x0 (physical 0x70200000)

(as well as a ton of other stuff I can post if needed)


I've used fatload to put the nk.nb0 image to 0xa0200000, but when I try "go 0xa020000", all I get is "## Starting application at 0xa020000)" and nothing.


I've also tried the same with eboot.nb0 in various memory addresses, and with a random nk.nb0 I found online which had the appropriate start address just to see if it was our files, and I got the same lack of output.


I there any setting or feature I need to change in uboot to make this work? I've found numerous examples of people online saying they've gotten this type of thing to work, but can't seem to find any instructions on how to do it other than use fatload and go.


Thanks,


-Michael

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