Hello Beoworld,
It is quite easy to swap motherboard with a new/used Via Epia Ex 1500 Mhz board, so here's a small guide on how to do it.
The only issue is the extra coax and optical spdif connectors on the new board and to get the Beomaster 5 Service Tool.
My solution was:
(1) Drill 2 new holes in the BM5 cabinet / box to fit the extra 2 connectors.
(2) Remove the small noisy CPU fan on the CPU cooling fins. It is not needed.
(3) Buy a new cable with a 3 pin connector to connect to the original cable to the ML-PL-module and solder the new cable to the two soldering points of the optical connector on the solder side of the Via motherboard.
The optical connector has 5 pins, but only 2 are used to connect to the ML-PL-module (right and left audio channel). On the original motherboard there are 3 pins, but the pin in the middle is not used. So solder the new cable to the 2 outer pins of the 3 soldering points sitting in a row.
Assemble the board and the BM5 is ready for the BM5 service tool.
The Service Tool (Service Manual included) can be downloaded here:
/forum/dutch/philips-tv-op-beosound-4#post-1730500
Be patient, as it is a very slow download, if you're not paying. Download is a 1.7 gb zip file and takes about 5-6 hours.
Use the included ImageUSB to load and write the 3.3 GB bin image file to a USB flash drive (6-8 gb).
Stick the usb flash drive into one of the usb ports on the board and attach a wireless usb keyboard and mouse to the other usb port (there are only 2 usb ports).
Start the BM5 and immediately press "Del" sereral times to make sure you get into the bios.
In the bios go to "Hard Disk Boot Priority". Here you should se the HDD and the USB drive. Set the USB drive as 1st boot device. Save and Exit, type Y to confirm and Enter.
Now the service tool should load (windows). I had to repeat the bios procedure a couple of times to succeed.
Go to the Service Manual to follow the procedure for replacing a motherboard (section 4.4 and 4.8).
(1) Click the button ‘Restore BM5 Serial From HDD’ and await confirmation.
(2) Click the button ‘Update BM5 BIOS’ and await confirmation.
Now the serials should match and you can reboot the BM5.
When I rebooted the BM5 would not start, but went into unresponsive black screen. I tried several times to use the recovery function without success.
The BM5 could only pass the 1st recovery step and just skipped the 2nd step and went into unresponsive black screen again. My guess is that the file structure on the HDD was damaged.
So I had to load the service tool again and this time I made a total reset to factory default with the function "Clone entire HDD". If you don't have a backup of your files, you could try the function "Clone HDD", which keeps your files.
If successfull, you will have BM5/BS5 restored. If reset to factory default, then set it up again with BM-USER passwords, etc. If you use the same password, you can keep the BM-SHARE and BeoConnect setup on your PC / Mac.
I hope this helps keeping BM5/BS5 systems alive and kicking :-)
Have a nice day,
Rendboell
PS. I now have an optical spdif output and an extra Coax spdif output :-)