Rockbox Technical Forums

Third Party => Repairing and Upgrading Rockbox Capable Players => Topic started by: tethyrian on May 31, 2018, 12:27:58 AM

Title: Clip+ internal flash failure
Post by: tethyrian on May 31, 2018, 12:27:58 AM
To my understanding not much work is done here anymore, so I suppose I would like to thank anyone willing to help me out in advance. My clip+ just didn't turn on one day when I got in the car. Tried to hard reset it the whole commute. Brought it home and it was recognizing as a 30 MB drive and not letting me format. I found the unbrick guide and managed to plug it in while jumping to recovery. fdisk -l shows 4 MiB which the guide says means my internal flash is fried. I'm wondering if there is anyway to install rockbox on my microSD card and boot from there, maybe even a way to identify and replace the internal flash? Or am I buying a new player? Has anything changed in the last 5 years where there is a player I should know about that would ever come anywhere close to how much I love this thing? I see the benjie t6 has a port available now, but I don't know if it could be used as a car adapter or how well it performs so if anyone knows a little that'd help. I found a refurbished one on eBay for not too much more than I paid for this one, I am definitely not beyond buying another one if I have to. Thank you.
Title: Re: Clip+ internal flash failure
Post by: Bilgus on May 31, 2018, 06:13:12 AM
Its already too late to do the micro sd thing since the devices carry their bootloader in a reserved area of flash, no one has successfully changed the flash as of yet.

So looks like a new player is in order
Title: Re: Clip+ internal flash failure
Post by: tethyrian on May 31, 2018, 06:04:03 PM
Bummer. I'll keep the thing around in case anyone becomes brave enough in the coming years to take on that challenge, I don't want to risk breaking anything more on it until then so into my dresser it goes until I see a fix or stop having room for it (I won't). In case anyone happens upon this thread with a similar issue they can't fix themselves, there are still a few refurbished clip+'s going for around $40, but the average price I'm seeing is $100... I don't know if I can justify buying a third refurbished clip+ (maybe if I find a new one in a couple years for a decent price I'll pick it up). I'm going with the agptek rocker v2 or benjie T6 (same player different brand I guess?) as a replacement for now.
Title: Re: Clip+ internal flash failure
Post by: alexeinevadov on July 20, 2018, 11:18:15 PM
Yesterday Google pointed me to what pretends to be a datasheet to flash chip SDTNPNAHEM-008G here (https://wenku.baidu.com/view/411af62db4daa58da0114a39.html), then scroll down and click to expand there:
(http://i2.imageban.ru/out/2018/07/21/ae9e0e5ee869a347ee8cbaadd8918367.png) (https://wenku.baidu.com/view/411af62db4daa58da0114a39.html)

A pinout (click to open image):
(http://i3.imageban.ru/thumbs/2018.07.21/b16269b318d54653fd7b07f105d8bd69.png) (https://imageban.ru/show/2018/07/21/b16269b318d54653fd7b07f105d8bd69/png)

It looks like very close to pinout used by Micron 29F chip (http://read.pudn.com/downloads160/ebook/718770/Micron%20NAND%20Flash%20MLC%2016,32,64,128Gb.pdf), maybe only neccessary to lift leg 38.

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Soldered off the flash chip, and there is its mounting place scanned (click to open image):
(http://i4.imageban.ru/thumbs/2018.07.21/9860d4ce9744658f4ef40834fa88446b.jpg) (https://imageban.ru/show/2018/07/21/9860d4ce9744658f4ef40834fa88446b/jpg)

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Tried few flash chips, 29f32g08cdf, 29f64g08taa and H27UBG8T2CTR, to no result. Something went wrong, when I soldered sandisk chip back, player still does not work, and it showed 30,6MB empty disk, that eats all writes.