Recovery connector?

[Mitch Bradley]

> Message: 5
> Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:58:14 -0400
> From: "Ricardo Carrano" <carrano at laptop.org>
> Subject: Recovery connector?
> To: Devel <devel at laptop.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<a31fbec40809160858q299972bqd9676a6840676399 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi!
>
> It seems that B2s do not have the serial recovery connector. I opened
> one that seems really bricked (when turned on only the power light is
> on, and removing battery and AC for some time do not fix it) and found
> just the place holder for the connector. Is that a way to save this
> B2?
>   

There are three ways to unbrick it, none of them trivial:

a) Solder on a recovery connector (requires a spare recovery connector, 
a recovery dongle, soldering skill, and recovery procedure skill)

b) Solder some wires directly to the recover pads and connect them to 
the recovery dongle, either via a header connector or by soldering 
directly to the pads on the dongle.  (This may seem tedious and 
unpalatable, but it doesn't take very long if you have a good soldering 
setup.)

c) Unsolder the SPI FLASH , reprogram it in a standalone programmer, and 
solder it back.  (This doesn't take long either if you have the tools.  
You can unsolder it by globbing solder across all of the pins at once.)

At one point I scavenged some recovery connectors from A-test boards.  
That's not easy; unsoldering them without ruining the plastic housing 
requires a lot of care and some luck.  The difficulty is the large 
(relatively speaking) metal mounting tabs underneath either side of the 
connector.  Those are hard to get loose.

> By the way, it seems that this XO was bricked when updated to the
> latest firmware.
>
> Yes, I know that B2 are not supported anymore, but it happens that
> they are useful for some non-gui networking tests. So, is it the case
> that the recent firmwares do not support B2?
>   

E-series firmware prior to q2e17c will brick B2, as indicated by the 
bright red warnings at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Firmware .

The bug (#8426) has been fixed.  The fix will be officially released in 
q2e18, but for now you can get http://dev.laptop.org/~wmb/q2e17d.rom  
which has the fix.