[time-nuts] Looking for help recovering a Spectracom 9383

[John Miller]

Hello Everyone!

TL;DR: If anyone with a Spectracom 9383 would be willing to help me 
recover mine, I would be eternally grateful!

Early last year I stumbled upon a local Spectracom NetClock 9383 for a 
very reasonable price. It worked just fine out of the gate, but because 
I am incapable of leaving well enough alone, I popped the hood, took an 
image of the CF card, plugged in a monitor and keyboard and instantly 
started to take a look at the BIOS and the OS. Curiosity satisfied, I 
put it back together and resumed using it as intended, but I noticed it 
was a bit unstable. (For what it's worth, it may have been unstable 
before I poked around inside of it, but I never ran it for long enough 
before opening it to know...) When I say that it was unstable, I don't 
mean the clock, but the PC hardware itself - it was crashing and locking 
up.

So if figured, if it's not entirely broken, fix it 'till it is!

I tried two things first: I put the image from the original CF card onto 
a similar linear CF card and I swapped out the RAM SODIMM for another, 
though those changes didn't improve the situation. So, despite the fact 
that I know the Spectracom engineers configured the SOM modules 
specifically to be reliable in the configuration in which they were 
shipped, I decided to re-flash the BIOS on mine to a newer version. This 
was, I believe, the pivotal mistake. The Advantech SOM-4455 PC module 
was shipped in the 9383 with BIOS v1.14, and Advantech had a v1.15 
available on their website. I downloaded this updated BIOS image, the 
flashing tool (or at least what I thought was the right flashing 
tool...), and I made a FreeDOS-booting CF card. The 9383 booted off of 
this right away, and I used the utility to make a backup of the original 
BIOS and configuration, then wrote the new BIOS to the chip - and then 
it crashed and stalled.

I rebooted the machine, but sure enough the BIOS was corrupted and 
didn't boot. I went out and bought a TL866II EEPROM programmer and PLCC 
adapter and confirmed that, sure enough, the BIOS on the chip was 
trashed. To make matters worse, the backup that the utility took of the 
chip was similarly trash. I was able to use the EEPROM programmer to 
burn the v1.15 BIOS to the chip and get it booting again, and while I 
can get into the BIOS and start to boot the OS, it won't boot completely 
- it hangs when it loads one of the custom Spectracom kernel modules. 
Additionally, any BIOS settings that may have been there are now gone.

While digging through configuration files and scripts on the disk image, 
I was able to find names of a few engineers who had worked on the 9383, 
and when I contacted them they were willing to talk about it. They 
confirmed that the only ran the 9383 with the stock BIOS  from 
Advantech, they didn't make any custom modifications to it, but they 
probably did make some changes to the default settings, though they 
weren't able to confirm for sure.

I suspect that one or more things is happening here:
1) BIOS v1.15 breaks something that their custom hardware kernel modules 
relied on
2) Losing a setting in the BIOS is preventing said module from loading 
correctly (I have tried iterating through BIOS settings hundreds of 
times)
3) The interface on either the planar or the SOM-4455 module is damaged 
(I have inspected everything as closely as I can and it all looks 
fine...)
4) The SOM-4455 has been damaged
5) The planar has been damaged
6) The universe has determined that it is not meant to be.

I have tried contacting both Spectracom and Advantech, but Spectracom 
has no interest in helping me fix something that A) is 15 years old, 
B)has  been tinkered with in massively unsupported ways, C) is not even 
in the hands of the original buyer. Advantech hasn't responded to me at 
all, and I have been able to find BIOS v1.14 on their website at all. 
Best I can determine the file should be called "4455v114.bin" but I have 
not been able to turn it up anywhere. Go figure they're not interested 
in supporting 15 year old hardware.

I have looked into getting a SOM-compatible backplane to see if my 
module works in other circumstances, but they tend to be very expensive 
when they do show up. Similarly I've thought about simply getting 
another SOM-4455, but all of those that I have found has been outside of 
my price range.

At the very least what I hope that someone here with a 9383 can help me 
with is restore the proper BIOS configuration settings. If anyone is 
willing to crack theirs open, attach a VGA monitor and PS/2 keyboard, 
and simply take pictures of each of the configuration screens I can try 
and match my v1.15 BIOS to what it is *supposed* to be. Even better 
would be if someone could pop out their BIOS chip and get an EEPROM dump 
of v1.14 + the configuration. If you don't have an EEPROM reader, I'd be 
happy to loan you mine, or if you want to send me the chip I can dump it 
and mail it back. I would also be happy to mail my SOM-4455 to someone 
to see if it works in an otherwise-fine 9383.

I know that this isn't the best piece of equipment in the world (mine 
isn't even an Ru or OCXO model), but it deserves to live and I have a 
strong feeling that it's not dead! I just can't bare to see it get 
trashed.


Regards,
John
KK4YWH


PS - Failing all of that.. if anyone is looking for a spare 9383 for 
parts...