Hello folks, my trusty old iRiver H10 20G was the audiobook listening device of my girl friend. It already had rockbox installed and did it job over the years. Then some new audio books were supposed to be added and 20GB are not infinite. As she dearly loves that player with it's simplicity and sound quality an upgrade seemed resonable.
As upgrade solution I chosen a CF compact flash disk with a ZIF to CF adapter card:
I simply dumped the content of old drive with dd on my linux box. Pushed that image back onto the new CF card and enlarged it with gparted. That worked for half a year. Then the player fell down from it's nightstand and stopped working. I openend it up and the CF card had simply slipped out of the adapter. In some way that had corrupted the file system: The player still worked in a way but windows did not like the mass storage it saw and wanted to format it. I guess the player fell more then once and the card slowly slipped out of the connector making funny thinks at the end, when the connection got real wonky. A drop of hotglue and a nicely decorated wooden tray for the player will hopefully stop the card from slipping and the player from dropping.
I still had the old dumped image but I decided for a reinstall and I did it this way:
- delete the old partition and partition the player with a 32768 MB fat32 partition under windows 10
- use the old IRiverFirmwareUpdater to reinstall the original firmware
- use "option + power + reset-pin"- trick to boot the player in UMS mode and use the rockbox utility to install rockbox 3.15
- boot up your linux box and use gparted to enlarge the partition to the whole disk
I tried to find the old IRiverFirmwareUpdater on their site but could not find it. Luckily I had the last version on disk. To help you folks, I uploaded it to this location:
IRiverFirmwareUpdaterMy Conclusion:The compact flash card (Transcend TS128GCF800) and adapter works for me, but huge and fast CF disks are kind of pricy. Luckily they are still used for high end cameras. There are ZIF to sdcard adapters (
iFlash-solo comes to mind) around, but I avoided that additionally layer of complication. The good adapters are pricy too and the cheap ones have very mixed reports. Most folks would simply use an old smartphone for the job, but the girlfriend likes the H10 very much and hates smartphones.