Today I put the idea to the test, with rather exciting initial results. The only thing obviously missing was a hard drive, so I put in one that was lying around. It may be the one that I had used in the 460. Plugged in monitor, mouse, and wireless keyboard and turned it on. Wow, messages coming on screen! But it found no software to boot, finally giving up with
I inserted an old OS4.1 DVD and rebooted. No luck. I spent a lot of time trying out things that came up with >help. Is there any way to stop the results of the help command before some of the interesting commands scroll off the top of the monitor screen?AOS4 FLB
FLB: no SLB found in any of the designated boot sources; returning to u-boot.
Press any key to continue
I tried some of the commands "help" listed. System Information seemed not to know about the hard drive I had installed. Something reported "SATA Device0: not available." I tried tftpboot and got a string of "T"s before it gave up; a rarpboot (somethining like that) also failed, without the "T" stuff. But it must be connecting with the internet: I tried "date," and it came up with today's date, though the clock was 3 hr 5 min fast.
Due in part to rapidly advancing dementia, I don't understand what the SAM460ex End user manual has to say about PATA and SATA. I'll have to study up with Google. The hard drive I put in seems to have only one connector slot, 4-pin male.
In the meantime I thought I'd bring the issue up here, in hopes of getting some good hints on how to get the old SAM running again (maybe even OS4.1FE Update1?).