[57north-discuss] Bricked Startech IP-KVM

[Tom Jones]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2021 at 09:05:41PM +0000, Tony Travis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As you know, I accidentally 'bricked' my Startech SV841DUSBI IP-KVM 
> attempting to upgrade the firmware using the built-in Web GUI and 
> despite the best efforts of Startech product support they can't help me 
> to reload the firmware, which means my IP-KVM is now 'bricked' :-(
> 
> However, I connected an RS232 null-modem to the DTE serial port of the 
> IP-KVM to see if the Startech Linux controller outputs any diagnostic 
> information - It does, and and I captured the Linux kernel boot log 
> attached below.
> 
> Unfortunately, Linux does not boot successfully because the image is 
> corrupted...
> 
> Does anybody know if the version of U-Boot installed on this board can 
> be used to reload the Linux firmware image over the serial port?
> 
> I've not found a way of interrupting the boot to get interactive control 
> of U-Boot. Normally, you just press a key within the first few seconds, 
> but that doesn't seem to work on the board in my bricked IP-KVM...
> 

Can you break into u-boot?

If you can get a u-boot prompt then you can probably dump the flash.
>From u-boot, I don't see the normal 'press any key to interrupt boot'
message so you might be out of luck.

If you can share internals photos and a firmware image then we might be
able to manually flash any spi eeproms. Risky, but might be worth it.

- Tom