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Topic: Weird motherboard thing

Dominic Espinosa
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1172
From: Boulder Creek, CA.
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 03-22-2011 11:51 PM

I'd love to know what y'all think about this. My conspiracy theory mind has some ideas already that are probably wrong...

I came to have 3 Sony VSP-NS7 network signage players in my possession that I want to run my own software on. The Sony software is far too expensive for so few features.

As with most of their products that are actually manufactured in Japan, the system is pretty solid.
The BIOS has a password on it that prevents you from entering it AT ALL. And I haven't found a way around that yet.

However, if you slap a SATA optical drive on the secondary channel it'll boot right up just fine off of it.

Unfortunately it only stays booted up for about 12 minutes. After that it resets, goes through POST and comes back up.

This seems to be the case whether it's running Windows or not.
Obviously it doesn't do this when it's running the Sony signage software.
So I'm wondering now a.) is it really possible that the hardware will do this if it's not being told not to by the software?
And b.) has anyone heard of this? What's it called?

I'd like to not scrap the motherboards since they do technically work but if I don't have a work-around before Cinemacon comes, I'm going to have to dump them so I can wrap this up before leaving.

Any wild ideas?

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Aaron Sisemore
Flaming Ribs beat Reeses Peanut Butter Cups any day!

Posts: 3061
From: Rockwall TX USA
Registered: Sep 1999

posted 03-27-2011 10:17 AM

If this is PC based, it sounds like a power supply issue. I have had a few PCs that would exhibit the exact same symptoms when the PS was about to go, or was overloaded (too many USB devices connected for example)... WARNING - if the PS does finally fry it can take the entire system with it.

As for the BIOS lockout, there is usually a jumper somewhere on the motherboard that allows you to hard clear the CMOS, which should allow you to get in without a password. Removing the CMOS battery for a few minutes with the system off will also do this.

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Dave Casselman
Film Handler

Posts: 1
From: Olds, Alberta, Canada
Registered: May 2011

posted 06-07-2011 09:26 PM

I too got 3 of these VSP-NS7 boxes that we replaced with other systems. The CMOS password is indeed locked up tight. No amount of guessing or internet searches has found the right word. I have removed the MB and pressed tin foil to all the contacts in an effort to short out the memory, changed the dip jumpers and tried rebooting with various keys held down. I have not unsoldered or cut out the battery but to this point it is not changed.

I removed the SATA 120 gig 5400rpm drive and connected it to a Mac using a USB adapter so I could see what was on it. It showed as either 3 or 4 volumes and it was either XP or NT but I cannot remember which. They were formatted NTFS so they were locked as far as the Mac was concerned.

I could not figure out how to install a new operating system on the drive because of the lack of CD/DVD and could not get the box to recognize a drive I connected to the IDE connector.

My goal now was to get RedHat running on the box so I could install some open source DSP software.

Reformatted the drive for DOS using the Mac.
Downloaded Fedora 15 disc image and created a bootable DVD using my Mac.
Connected the SATA drive to my old PC laptop using the same USB/SATA adapter.
Booted the PC laptop with the new Fedora install DVD.
Ran install and setup procedure from Fedora and reformatted the SATA drive again.
Installed complete Fedora 32bit version on the SATA drive.
Reinstalled the drive back in the Sony DSP box.
Added an extra 512 RAM piece just because I had it.

The unit turned on and booted up in the Fedora OS. It found the internet as soon as I remembered to connect the cable.

HOWEVER

As the original poster noted, there seems to be a problem in that the system wants to constantly reboot (mine is every 7 minutes). So after 7 minutes of correct use of Fedora it beeps and reboots itself. So I have to agree with this theory.

The second poster suggested that the power supply may be inadequate to operate the extra load of a disk drive. My only extra load was the added memory. So I removed that and the reboot continued to occur.

Conclusion: I think there is something in the CMOS somewhere that is checking for a valid verification in the Sony OS. I am going to find another MB somewhere and put it in the DSP box to check. This may take me a while as I am not a PC person and have very limited access to PC parts. Mac stuff only. But I will post back if I ever figure this out.

BTW, it is not that my boxes were not working. I have the seriel numbers and licence numbers. When I connect one of these in my house, my service provider sends be an automated email warning me of massive amounts of unwanted traffic jamming the network!!

Cheers, Dave.

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Sean Weitzel
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 619
From: Vacaville, CA (1790 miles west of Rockwall)
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 06-07-2011 09:41 PM

Hi Folks,

I stumbled across a very interesting site that might have some clues:
http://www.ndarkness.com/2010/09/577/sony-vsp-ns7-digital-signage-hacking/

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Mark Hajducki
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 500
From: Edinburgh, UK
Registered: May 2003

posted 06-08-2011 03:16 PM

I think auto-reboot features are added to many systems that are designed to run unattended (Cash machines (ATMs) are the other example I can think of).

If the software running on the system does not confirm that it is alive within a certain period of time the system will reboot.

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Dominic Espinosa
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1172
From: Boulder Creek, CA.
Registered: Jan 2004

posted 06-14-2011 07:11 PM

Well that sure is interesting...

After countless ... well minutes, I'm not that obsessed, googling I couldn't turn that up!

I wonder how all this bios auto-reboot nonsense works. Seems like if you knew where in memory to write and what to write making a shell script to fix the auto-reboot nonsense would be straight-forward.

Thanks guys.

PS

In the time since i did in fact scrap one of the mobos...It' snow happily running Debian and a 25 line perl script that runs a playlist into MPlayer and accepts remote commands via a web interface (that script is a bit longer ~300 lines) to handle upload, playlist edit, and reboot.

Cheers! [beer]

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