Severe new bug in firmware Q2D13?

[Mitch Bradley]

Some of the machines from the first production run had bad battery 
holders.  Not the main battery, but rather the small "coin cell" battery 
on the mainboard that powers the time-of-day/calendar clock chip.  Those 
battery holders have a plastic retention lip that holds the coin cell in 
place.  On the bad ones, the lip is too small, and the batteries can 
become loose or even fall out entirely.  When this happens, the 
time-of-day/calendar clock chip loses its power, forgets what day it is, 
and resets to the earliest date.

The long-term solution is to replace the battery holder, but I don't 
know what the logistics of this would be in your situation.  It might 
involve swapping the main boards and sending the bad ones to a repair 
depot, or perhaps sending the entire laptop for repair, or perhaps 
getting a supply of the battery holders and replacing just them.

As an interim solution, it might be possible to use glue to hold the 
coin cell battery in place.  Open the laptop, insert the battery firmly 
in the holder, and put glue around the rim of the holder where the 
plastic contacts the battery, taking care not to put glue on the metal 
contacts.  You might want to experiment with different kinds of glue 
that you have readily available to find on that sticks to the plastic 
battery holders.  I am doing some experiments here.  So far I have found 
that hot-melt glue does not work well (it doesn't stick).  Solvent-based 
household cement seems to stick, but I haven't had time to let it harden 
fully.  I am also trying white glue (polyvinyl acetate).  I'm pretty 
sure that epoxy would work, because it sticks well to a lot of things, 
but it is slightly harder to work with than one-part glues.  "Super 
glue" (cyanoacrylate) would probably work too, but I don't have any 
handy so I haven't tried it.

After you have secured the battery in the holder, activate the laptop, 
then use the Linux "date" and "hwclock" commands to set the system 
date.  (Or "ntpdate" and "hwclock" - see 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Customizing_NAND_images#Time)

If you have developer keys for those machines and a wireless access 
point that is connected to the Internet, you can set the date from the 
firmware:

  ok  wifi MYSSID
  ok  ntp-set-clock

where "MYSSID" is the SSID of your access point.  That assumes an "open" 
access point.  If the access point uses "WEP" security (which isn't very 
good), you must first set the key with:

  ok wep 123456789a

where the argument is a 10-character or 26-character hex number.

If the access point uses WPA security, you must first set the "preshared 
key" with

  ok wpa xxxxxxxxxxxx

where the argument is a 64-character hex number.  WPA authentication can 
be complicated, so it might not work for you.

Emiliano Pastorino wrote:
> Scott,
> We're having serious problems here in Uruguay with firmware Q2D13. 
> Some laptops, after flashing them, show an "Invalid system date" error 
> at boot time. The laptop won't boot because after that it shows a 
> "Lease expired" message and tries to activate. We could activate the 
> laptop, but when you reboot it, the same error message appears.
> In the time between we activate the laptop and before we reboot it, we 
> could check the date, it says "mar nov 30 01:35:11 EST 1999". This 
> started to happen after we upgrade the firmware from Q2D07 (which had 
> an activation problem) to Q2D13. It seems that the
> I've attached three screenshots of the boot screen.
> We need someone to check this and solve the problem asap.