Hi,

I bought a WSoD-770 some time ago thinking that I could get a cheap low-power little shell/server of it. The device worked fine and booted nicely. But I was an idiot and I threw the broken screen away without checking whether the device boots without the screen. And it didn't. (judging from the speaker)

Fortunately I have a fully functioning 770 too. Fearing I had broken the massively expensive investment (15€), I connected the screen from my previous 770 to the 770 that wouldn't boot. And lo and behold, it worked. After firing the device up, I then yanked the LCD off and the device continued working.

So the question is, what pins do I have to short on the LCD connector so that I can get the device to boot. I looked at the schematics but I couldn't figure out the correct pins. My best guess would be that there's some sort of reset pin that needs to be pulled up.

Any help would be appreciated :)

Try enabling R&D mode via flasher and possibly also disable watchdogs.

I have one 770 with LCD completely dead (but present) and it boots with R&D mode enabled. When seeing serial console output from bootloader it checks for LCD and fails to detect the hardware but it still boots. There are some errors later in boot sequence but I get the shell on serial and device stays on.

I tried disabling the watchdogs to no avail. When setting the flags and if the setting fails (e.g. unknown flag) the boot error log is displayed and there's the "no lcd panel detected".

I guess I'd be needing a serial cable then?

OK, my fault. I tried it some time ago and forgot details. I tried it again and indeed the device constantly reboots. Here is full log of serial console in this state. There is place where one can "Press any key for interactive startup" to get into initfs shell and avoid rebooting.

Not necessarily but it will make things simpler indeed. One variant of CA-42 cable from ebay will do.

Or you can hack kernel to let the framebuffer initialize without panel being present. Or you can flash custom rootfs with the rebooting stuff disabled.

Hmm, yeah.. I guess I'm going to have to make a custon rootfs then. Thanks a lot mate!