There seems to be a lot of people who got the AMD 7040 board as a mystery box MB. I haven’t seen clear information on what is needed to get this board (or others) to Post/Run.
I’ve heard some conflicting information, and I guess there are really two goals here, POSTing and installing and running an OS.
POSTing would help know if you have a functional board from a mystery box,
From what I’ve heard you need RAM and an RTC battery to POST, but in my experience that isn’t all. I’ve tried that with mine and am still getting the RED then Blue (repeat) light pattern (which from what I can tell, means something isn’t plugged in/assembled)
I see that there is a case switch and I’ve tried depressing that and plugging it in but I haven’t noticed a difference when doing that.
I’m guessing once you post it, getting an OS booted is just adding a drive?
anyone else trying to setup their mysterybox 7040? What has been your experience.
I haven’t gotten my FW13 7640 mainboard to boot (Based on the post code LED (which did show up for one cycle after a minute or so of the red-blue pattern), it has other problems (see I guess this AMD7640U is dead? - #3 by Patrick_1 for details)), but I have gotten the FW16 7840 mainboards (also from the mystery box) to boot. It seems you need - at least initially - a full laptop battery, not just the RTC coin cell.
Once you’re able to boot to the BIOS, you can enable standalone mode, and from then on it should work without the battery.
Note that I haven’t tested all combinations, specifically I don’t believe I tried booting with only the RTC battery, but I did try many times to boot without any batteries at all, following many suggested tricks online, but wasn’t able to get it to boot (or do anything besides blink the LEDs red and blue repeatedly) at all until adding the system battery. Then it booted seamlessly on the first try. Hope this helps!
Also to answer your last question, yes, once it was able to boot to the BIOS I was able to boot from a USB SD card, just like any other PC.