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

[Fabio Estevam]

Hi Michael,

On Mon, Aug 20, 2018 at 4:55 PM, Michael Newton
<mnewton at pylonelectronics.com> wrote:
> 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.

What if you take the U-Boot 2009 source code that works fine and port
it to a recent U-Boot version?

Then you could create a device tree that describes your hardware and
you can fully boot Linux with all access to the source code :-)

Would that work for you?