Error: failed PB timebomb check

Submitted by Michel on December 3, 2021 - 05:27

iMX6
UPDATE 3 March 2022: Microsoft has finally fixed romimage (and several other issues) in the December 2021 Wave 7 update for WEC2013 that they released through DPC on the 15th of February 2022. Direct link to the download is here (but you need to have registered with DPC and have Embedded IoT access rights).

Today, 3 December 2021, Windows Embedded Compact 2013 decided enough is enough!

At least romimage.exe did...

According to Microsoft there should not be any time bomb checks in WEC2013. The last version to have time-bombs was WEC7, but today we find out this is not true. Note that this time-bomb happens for all WEC2013 installations, including the fully licensed ones.

New Zealand was the first to notice (hooray for me!), followed by Australia and by now I'm sure you on the other side of the world have found this blog post looking for a solution...

Well, here it is:

A bit of old-school hacking and cracking and here is the patched romimage.exe. A simple change of 'jg' to 'jmp' and we circumvent the time-bomb check.

Replace C:\WINCE800\public\common\oak\bin\i386\romimage.exe with the one in the 7z package you can download here.

Enjoy!

PS. 7-zip password is 'guruce'.

PS2. I have opened a support case with Microsoft to get this issue resolved via an official update but, since this is 100% blocking any work you do with WEC2013, I think/hope MS will not sue me for cracking their time-bomb while we wait for the official fix...

Comments

Xuezhong - December 7, 2021 - 07:16

Thanks Michel for the quick fix. I think Microsoft should give you a reward for such a critical bug. I am not kidding :)

yi he - December 7, 2021 - 09:18

2021 Dec 3, I also found this issue, I changed PC system time to older time to avoid this issue, and can build OK. But this solution is not convenient to use, need to reset PC system time every power on PC.
Michel can find this issue and find a good solution to fix it timely. Very professional !

TORRELLI - January 5, 2022 - 09:57

Hello Michel,

When you first published this article, I tried to do a Clean Sysgen and could not reproduce the issue. Now, back from holidays, I tried again and bumped into "BUILD: [01:0000008141:INFO ] Error: failed PB timebomb check". This line only appears inside the "Build.log" file.

Your work saved my day Michel. Thanks for your work !

Michel Baillargeon - February 17, 2022 - 17:24

Thank you for finding the source of the problem and for hacking a solution, saving us time and pain.

Yann Oeffner - March 29, 2022 - 11:42

It seem the issue has been solved with Wave7.

But in the meantime your workaround helped al lot.

Thank you again !