V3B / V4 -- Hardware V3B was printed in 2 places inside my unit. (V4 unit) 266mhz Rise processor Yamaha audio No goop on BIOS chip -- HDD cable The pin headers are silk screened as if they were normal, but they are not. The top and bottom rows of pins are swapped. There are a few ways around this. One is to crimp on a second header right next to the first on a 2.5" IDE cable. This works only if you have a spare header. I had a single small 2.5" IDE cable with 2 headers. I removed one, flipped every set of 2 wires, and re-connected it. The trick when you put the new header back on is to align the wires in the tray portion of the header, the piece that comes off. Don't try to align them on the metal pins. They'll align themselves. -- BIOS Plug in your iOpener. If it powers on by itself, power it off and back on manually. You should see the iOpener logo (words only) splash on black background. Press "TAB" immediately to see the BIOS post screen. The screen says "Press DEL to enter setup" but you need to press CTRL+ALT+ESC with a regular keyboard attached (not the iOpener keyboard.) Both the TAB and CTRL+ALT+ESC I have to press several times. Sometimes I have to power cycle it a few times as well. My original bios posted with: Award Modular Bios 4.51PG 03/23/2000-VP4-686-IPC_VIAC-00 backup of original bios in v3b_bios_original.bin (not sure what for, but just in case.) CF Card (256MB Lexar) Original geometry (sfdisk -g) /dev/sdc: 984 cylinders, 16 heads, 32 sectors/track manually set geometry failed (sfdisk -C 490 -H 2 -S 32 /dev/sdc -- failed Ubuntu 15.10, sfdisk doesn't do this any more?) wiped partition on card. dd the v2image.bin (or v2image_new.bin for v4, _new works for all actually) geometry now shows: /dev/sdc: 7872 cylinders, 2 heads, 32 sectors/track (veghead) Goto "Standard CMOS Setup" Change drive C to None Change drive D to 490,2,65535,489,32,NORMAL In "BIOS Features Setup" - change the boot sequence to "D,A,SCSI" (this works, even though my geometry didn't show correctly.) Boots to oldschool iopener version, male voice, etc. press "4444", brings up QNX terminal. Not sure how many "4's" you have to type, keep pressing them. if the terminal gets covered, type "4444" again to uncover it. WRITING TO QNX IMG You only need to do this if you need to modify the v2 image file. Otherwise, just use the _new image file. qnx4fs-03-may-2009.tgz http://qnxfs.narod.ru 2.6.8 - 2.6.29 kernels off-tree build, worked with 2.6.32 Unless you have QNX, writing to a QNX hard drive is a pain in the neck. At least, it was for me. I had to install a Ubuntu 10.04 virtual machine, compile a custom kernel, and compile the module to mount it rw. That work is done, and the result is the v2image_new.bin, which includes the 540a bios and the updated qnxflash (in /app/ztest). WARNING: qnxflash version 1.00 that is incldued in the v2image_original.bin does NOT work for V3B+ units with a Rise 266 chip. Your milage may vary, but you risk bricking your BIOS. qnxflash102 is an udpated version that is in the v2image_new.bin, and it works properly. first, backup your BIOS image: qnxflash102 -r backup.bin then, flash your bios: 1. rip your old bios with -r (qnxflash102 -r oldbios.bin) 2. verify the rip worked with -v (qnxflash102 -v oldbios.bin) 3. write the new bios with -w (qnxflash102 -w V540a.bin) 4. verify the write worked with -v (qnxflash102 -v V540a.bin) If you want to use something other that V540a, go for it. The "bios_image_256k.bin" is the V2 bios I believe, and that one should give you access to boot from an HDD as well. If it fails during any part of the BIOS programming, try that part again. v1.00 of qnxflash failed for me with an erase error at 0x0, but a reboot was still possible (the bios hadn't actually been erased.) Ultimately, you don't want to reboot after a failure unless you've tried everything else. If you nuke your BIOS, you'll have to buy a new chip, or buy a chip programmer. Reboot. You use "DEL" to enter the bios now. Bios should now report Wild Pencil 5.40a Power off and put in your actual HDD/CF drive. Setup your bios C drive to match the new drive (or auto-detect). Tell the bios to boot from C at this point. That's it, you should be able to boot your OS. DSL linux worked fine and was pretty snappy on mine with a 1G CF card. RAM upgrade I dropped a Kingston KTM-TP390X/256 256MB module into my V4. Works like a charm.