Troubleshooting the x86 ROM Boot Loader (Windows CE 5.0)

Use the following procedure to troubleshoot the x86 ROM boot loader.

To troubleshoot the x86 ROM boot loader

On your development workstation, configure the terminal emulator, such as HyperTerminal or CETerm, to the following settings:

Bits per second Data bits Parity Stop bits Flow control

38400 8 None 1 None

The boot loader displays status and error information over the connection.
Check the state of the usedhcp environment variable.

For example, with a terminal emulator program, halt the loader boot process by powering on the system and pressing any key during the countdown prompt.

Then, type set to display the environment variables.

When set to 1, the boot loader will use a DHCP server to obtain its IP address.

When set to 0, it will use the values assigned to ip and subnet.

Make sure the correct settings are used for the network connection being used.
After setting a boot loader variable with the set command, execute a store to save the settings to CMOS if you want them to persist across system reboots.
When booting from a hard drive, if romboot cannot locate Nk.bin, the problem might be that you do not have a valid MBR on the drive; if so, use fdisk /mbr to fix the problem.

Additional resources