Hello there! Could someone shed some light on my doubt!
Hello everyone,
Greetings!
This is my first post in this forum. Well anyway lets get to business.
I got myself 2 64 GB playbook in 2011 december, now i am bored with playbook. I would like to know how can i install free and open source Operating systems.
a little bit of info about me. i been working with coreboot and openwrt for a long time. and I am okay with using a jtag and a buspirate. and i have decent soldering skills. enough to do soic smd soldering and also learning bga reworking.
this is my first post and i been reading the mails here. and in one of the post i read there is something called bootrom, iirc by xsacha. can xsacha or someone let me know in details how to solder this chip out of the mobo and also many people told us we can coreboot laptops. and now its been done. and many people told us we cant do squat when it comes to replacing the soic8 chip which is only 2 MB in thinkpad t60 with a higher pin.
well i removed the 2 Mb and i replaced it with a 4 MB chip and now i am planning to upsize it to 8 MB soic8 flash chip. So if its a flash chip on board it can be done with ease and i heard there is some kind of bootrom chip inside cpu am i right?
first off i am bored with the playbook OS and blackberry's lack of will power with the bootloader. i do believe in peace and non violence but sometime violence is the only solution. like how i had to mercilessly kiss and kill the 2 MB thinkpad t60 soic8 chip with a higher one. looks like i am ready to dive deep with the blackberry playbook 64 GB board.
this is sickening and really frustrating. anyway for those who cant believe that thinkpad t60's flash chip cant be upsized here is the proof. flashrom 4 MiB - Pastebin.com
now i am working currently with t410 and t420 and planning to port coreboot to it. so i guess i have a plenty of time to play with playbook hardware when i meet with a disastrous failure with coreboot. kind of distraction.
so can someone tell me which is the bootrom chip, is it an electronic chip?
can we rs232 or serial console and trap the boot log?
can we jtag into this machine?
can we wipe clean this device (bootrom)?
can we use UV to wipe clean the bootrom (be it a chip or be it on the cpu)? i am willing to take the risk.
i am not a bounty hunter and i am doing this for pure pleasure and adventure and to give blackberry a flipping bird.
I am planning to run debian wheezy or jessie or sid on this trapped paradise.
any insight information is needed. and please no negative suggestions like "this will turn into a 500 US$ worth brick." i know the risk i am taking and i am fully aware that i am no longer going to enjoy the blue pill and i am ready to bite the red pill and go to wonderland and would like to see how deep the rabbit hole is.
can someone here tell me the way to rabbit hole. if no one ready to walk with me? i will walk alone the rabbit hole.
really sick and stuck in trapped paradise with blackberry's BS!
thanks
-paul
you mean not even hardware hacks?
Thanks diegonei,
you mean you can remove one or more than one chip from the board and then wipe clean everything and then proceed? this cant be! thumb rule of encryption is "it will be broken! (TM)" its just a matter of time. cant we bypass this frikkin rom chip or bootrom chip?
i havent yet opened my blackberry. its still virgin unlike my thinkpads which are opened and broken and bashed and beaten up with solder and stuffs.
i agree this is not a one night smash and grab job this is a long and tedious one.
Since i havent opened my blackberry playbook yet i have no idea and the images are too tiny to look for the chips viz bootrom or et al. if this bootrom is like the dreaded tpm from infeneon then there also has to be a hard reset switch and if everything else fails that is if its a single write chip? then we may have to forcefully remove this chip and place it under an ultraviolet eraser and erase and reprogram this chip.
i guess i got all the necessary tools to do this job. i am not an electronics engineer but i am into software development. so my knowledge in electronics is ultra minimalistic. may be we are missing something. yes we are. if its a single write on then its an EEPROM which can ONLY be erased using ultra violet light. else we can reprogram this chip.
secondly, if its digitally signed? then the key has a definite expiry date. if thats the case then the chip needs to be reprogrammed with an upgrade or update in the OS. like how in thinkpad t60 and t410 and t420, lenovo updates the dmi sets. likewise we have only 2 possibility i.e. 0 & 1, 0 being its an single write UV eraseable eeprom else 1 which is it can reprogrammed with out a UV eraser. in that case i got eeprom programmers and also buspirate and other tools like jtag which i been using with openwrt.
thanks for your and many more feedbacks which are yet to come. and i will personally thank eash and every post no matter how much depressing the answers are.
time to go stubborn. reason, if its encryption? then it can be cryptanalysed or brute forced. if none of them work? manual reset. i am stubborn and adamant about it.
thanks for your feedback diegonei. i will wait for more and more information to flow in. because i am not giving up on this bi*ch.
sorry for my bad english i am from india and english is not my mother tongue.
-paul
people pour in more information. i need more information. and also if there is/are any/many hardware engineer can she/he help me locate this frikkin bootrom chip its location latitude and longitude on the system board? thanks again.