Neta 980 Lost its Mind

Think I figured it out.... stand by

Sorry, my mistake. The ROM I'm talking about is for the NEC MobilePro 900c. It's not compatible with the Airpanel. I forgot that you were new to this site, and didn't know that many of us have more than one device.

Okay. I've tried what hdokes was talking about above, and I think I've figured out what's actually going on.

When you do a hard boot with a BIN on the CF card it isn't being flashed, simply loaded. And for some reason a device with the 3.0 ROM chip can't load a 4.1 BIN.

The BIN must be in a certain spot to be flashed. I think we will need ActiveSync (running on a PC) to get this to work.

oooooh... gotta get up awfly early in the morning to get one over me. I found that it saves it automatically to the root of the CF storage card. Ok.... here are the two halves of the rom.... let me know what you find.

http://www.johnethan.com/AirPanel100/

Oh Nate.... I have many many devices.... all the hand helds are CE ....... going back to 2.0.... pretty certain I don't have any that are 1.0 .... but it's possible. This isn't my first rodeo.... however it is with the airpanel.

Ok... while we thrash around on the rom issue.... anyone actually get a cisco aironet 350 card to work with the airpanel 100 running CE .NET 4.1? The card does get recognized and drivers load... however... it never sees any SSID and hand entering the information doesn't make any difference either. The cards are good as I have tested them in an hp tablet and can work the net at will. Figure I must be overlooking something however this is the kinda thing I do for a livin.... and pretty sure I have all the bases covered.....

SSID
Static TC/IP info
WEP security

All accounted for.

Little more information on the network side.... when I hand enter a profile under preferred networks... then do a refresh... it is apparent that the airpanel sees the SSID as it becomes active (the icon) within the preferred networks window. However... any attempt to actually connect comes back with "Failed to associate with 'SSID'" in the wireless networking log. It just plain isn't reporting any SSID and lord knows there are plenty around the home here.... including my neighbors

I found out that the CE 3.0 on those Airpanels isn't H/PC 2000 - it's just a core version of CE 3.0. No PIMs, no Pocket Office - and the "Windows CE" banner is still on the Start Menu. (I always preferred that anyway. )

No, but it does have Pocket Word as well as third party spreadsheet and powerpoint. It also has a replacement for Outlook.

Unique, in any event.

Here is bootloader for CE.NET.
http://rapidshare.com/files/174611326/boot.bin.html
I made it from eboot.nb0 from package "Communicator 4.1_1.1C 013.zip" ("Thin Client 4.1_1.1T 006.zip" hase the same bootloader).
To add proper B000FF header I've used modified splitrom.pl from here http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=RomTools%2Fsplitrom.pl
BTW, I had to set starting address to 0x90000000.
I flashed it using FlashBin from CE 3.0 system. (I assume you can use bootloader procedure as well).
After restart I've seen VERY SCARY message about corrupt WinCE image.
(Latter I completed with firmware files from "Communicator 4.1_1.1C 013.zip" )
Then I did many experiments trying to flash image. I've tried to put all 3 files (eboot.bin,nk.bin,eboot.nb0) onto flash card. Tried to leave only two files eboot.bin,nk and eboot.nb0. Nothing seems to work. But eventually it started flashing procedure when I plugged CF with only one nk.bin file.
It's hard for me to tell right now correct sequence.
I think correct procedure must be:
1. put only eboot.nb0 file on CF, restart AirPanel. (however, I assume, we did tis already by flashing boot.bin)
2. remove eboot.nb0 and put eboot.bin and restart AirPanel.
Note: you can try to reflash both of them together.
3. remove eboot.* and put nk.bin and restart. At this point procedure took in my case about 10 minutes. But at least there lots of steps involved and bootloader is very verbose reporting progress. I seen no reason to worry about it.
4. And now I have brand new 4.1!!!

Probably new bootloader is more picky about CF card used in the flash sequence. In my case most critical step (nk.bin) completed from PQI Hi-speed 60x 2Gb CF card FAT32 formatted. Main and backup batteries was removed and hard reset button is used. And in root directory I had file nk.bin and no eboot.* files.

I think to can try this. Despite I had about 10-20 minutes worrying minutes before I saw nk.bin reflashing progress report :-)

Edited by shoora 2008-12-18 1:30 PM

Did anyone succeeded with upgrade?
BTW. My mistake update my CF card was FAT16. Firmware update does not work with FAT32.

I don't understand your instructions.

1. Copy boot.bin to \Temp
2. Start Firmware update from WinCe. Now you have new bootloader.
3. Format your CF card with FAT16.
4. Put eboot.bin file from official update onto CF. Restart device.
5. Put NK.bin file from official update onto CF. Restart device.
Now your device must run CE.NET 4.1

Nope. Didn't work.

Steps 1 & 3 weren't a problem, I knew how to do it.

Step 2 looked like it completed successfully.

I don't think Step 4 did anything, because Step 5 is hung while trying to load NK.bin. I'm going to let it sit for about half an hour. It might be working.