Re: [NTLK] [ANN] Patch 71J059 - Year 2010 Fix

From: Eckhart Koppen <lists_at_40hz.org>
Date: Sun May 24 2009 - 11:27:33 EDT

On May 24, 2009, at 10:49 , James Wages wrote:

> * Q1: I'm curious if there is any easy way to save alarms, then
> erase them,
> then apply the 71J059 patch, and then restore the alarms back?

No easy way, sorry. But you should run the Y2010 diagnostic tool to
see how many alarms you would have to reenter.

> *Q2: The "NOTE" in all caps at the beginning of your web page and the
> "Troubleshooting" page are very scary. Has anyone emailed you to
> say that
> their Newton has "failed to reboot after patch installation"? And
> have you
> determined what caused those failures?

I worded the warning this way because shit happens, and I can't give
any 100% warranty that it won't :) And if it happens, the Newton is
bricked and can only be revived with a temporary ROM board swap. But I
have not gotten any reports of this happening during wider testing,
and in theory, it should be safe to use the patch.

What causes the bricking is an endless loop or other crash due to
applying a low level patch in the wrong place. This only happens when
you modify the patch package file itself. This shouldn't usually
happen, unless you develop patches :) This applies also to the
official Apple patches.

The ROM board swap causes the Newton to apply a very low level reset
(goes deeper than a brain wipe) during which the internal memory
including the patch memory is cleared. It might be possible to trigger
this also via the diagnostic pins on the motherboard, but I haven't
looked into that at all.

Eckhart

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Received on Sun May 24 11:27:45 2009

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