Convert A MICROS PCWS 5A w/ HDD and Win?

[HTS-Chris]

Anyone ever successfully...gotten a 5A; to run a 2.5hdd or SSD. So as to load 7posready or 10IoT?

We've got proposals to do some conversions; and hardware costs, will be outrageous.

If we could find a way, to put a hard-drive in these things; could go a long way, to securing some sales.

So...here's a pic of the board. Top port, is where the Flash adapter goes; and the bottom...looks like PCI Express.

Possible...or NO?

 

[Darren_H]

there is a sata port in there and a stand off for power. but you need brackets for the hdds and windows licensing. there is a setting in the bios for CE defaults or win32 defaults, they can run 7 but you would need to get an image from your pos vendor. IMO it is not worth the time/ effort or money as they will be pretty slow and outdated, I would sell them and get a WS6 if you need win32 and micros

 

[HTS-Chris]

Thanks Darren. You're probably right.

 

[jherrick]

Going to do this one. As cheap as SSD is right now, for less than 30 bucks I can buy some more time.

Kingsington 160gb - $20.00
2gb Ram upgrade - $8.00

Hardest part here is finding this power cable to connect to the standoff, so I will probably just have to cut up some 4 pin molex to SATA power adapters, and crimp them to a molex 2695(?). Unless some micros dealer wants to sell me some factory made ones.

Im not positive, but I believe CE6 doesnt support the hyperthreading that the Atom has, so performance may be on par, or perhaps better?

 

[comet52a]

Micros used to sell a kit for this, the hdd mounted to the back of the lcd, I suppose you could use duct tape in a pinch :^). Sata cable was standard but power was custom, not sure how you would sub for that. They had a POSReady 2009 and a POSReady7 image for them.

 

[jherrick]

3M Command Tape, and 2 pin power adapter from ebay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-Pin-to-15-Pin-Female-Power-Cable-15-Inches/264038837185

Its actually pretty zippy, only thing is I get a code 43 for the graphics driver. I have used the oldest and the newest driver from the intel web site for the atom 450 pineview. Im also on q2011d bios, would love it if I could get my hands on the latest/final bios revision.

EDIT: One of the WS5a has q2012b bios version, and 2gb of ram! Win7 POS Ready doesnt throw error code 43 on this workstation. Is it possible to dump this bios and flash the others? Its a 2MB file, should I just flash the entire image to the bios, removing the -a flag from fprog? Im a bit anxious that the fpart.txt may not be the same. Any help here would be great, I may just try it on one and if I brick it, oh well.

 

[jherrick]

Bios dumped, edited mac address and unique identifier to match the workstation before flashing. Device manager is nice and clean with no errors! Modified 15 of these, maybe took ~15 minutes per workstation. Nice to be back in compliance again.

 

[comet52a]

Final bios is Q2012F which someone just posted on this board. There should be a version that runs from a thumb drive, or else take the files and put them on the root of the cf and reboot, then remove them from it after the update runs. Shouldn't have to remove doc or anything like was suggested.