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

[Andy Pont]

Michael wrote...

>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.
eboot.nb0 is the Windows CE bootloader and probably needs to be executed 
first.  The nk.nb0 file is the actual Windows CE image itself.  
Depending on the hardware configuration it may be that these are images 
that are copied as-is to RAM or could be XIP images for execution 
directly from flash if the hardware supports it and is configured that 
way.

>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).
This may not be successful.  One or both of the .nb0 files will contain 
hardware initialisation code and it may be that the initialisation 
provided by U-Boot causes a conflict.

If you want to contact me off list to discuss Windows CE specifics then 
we have the expertise to maybe help you move this forward.

-Andy.