Cowon D2

[shotofadds]

A working read/write SD/SDHC driver has now been committed to SVN. The main things to note are:

- if you install .rockbox to an SD card and power on the player with the card inserted, this will be used as the primary drive. This means your settings/playlists/highscores/etc/etc will be saved to this drive, and these will be automatically re-loaded on startup.

- if you don't have an SD card inserted at power on, everything should work as before (Rockbox will boot from the internal memory and everything will be read-only).

- if you're feeling adventurous, you should be able to swap cards while Rockbox is running, but make sure to have the same .rockbox folder installed on both cards!

- if you booted from an SD card, the internal memory will show in the file browser as "<microSD1>" - This will be fixed eventually.

- if you booted from an SD card, and then remove the card, you can't view any files at all in the file browser until you re-insert a card. This is a bug that needs to be fixed.

- there is currently no support for MMC cards.

[vodi]

Thank you all! This works fantastic with my 16GB SDHC card!

[shotofadds]

I've just had a rather worrying issue where my 16GB SDHC card will no longer power up. It appears to be dead in both my D2 and with a PC card reader.  :'(

I can't be 100% sure whether this failure can be attributed to Rockbox or not, so in the meantime be very careful which cards you use with Rockbox. I wouldn't recommend using anything valuable until we have identified whether this driver really is safe to use.

I hadn't had any problems in a couple of weeks of use, until today's problem. It could be that I simply removed the card while it was in use or something like that, but it could equally be due to a software bug.

In short: for the time being only use cards you don't mind losing... you have been warned.

[Monkeytamer]

Shotofadds: Amazing job with all of the recent updates and the entire port in general. This port has really breathed life into my Cowon D2. I like having so much more control over my device, and am really loving gapless. I have really missed using Rockbox and am thankful for another opportunity.

So far I am having a great results with the SD(HC) support on my 16GB A-Data SDHC card. The D2 just feels so much faster and more responsive; I have observed no instance of lag or poor performance and most features work quite well.

I haven't encountered any repeatable bugs/errors at the moment, but admit to encountering some initial trouble locating the "play" button, though I understand that this emanates from a lack of buttons.

Suffice to say, thank you for your efforts and revitalizing an already great Digital Audio Player.

[hpfmn]

sound quite awesome that you got it work... I might try it out later

and I hope you'll find out what fucked up your card. Maybe it was the also the card itself and had nothing to do with rockbox as far as other people do not seem to have a problem... maybe also it has something to with the kind of cards.

btw. I don't use partitions on my card do I have to use partitions or will the card recognized if it is just one filesystem without partion/mbr settings?

[funman]

An unpartitioned card with only a fat32 filesystem should be alright.

[Bkd11]

Maybe it was also the card itself and had nothing to do with rockbox as far as other people do not seem to have a problem... maybe also it has something to with the kind of cards.

He's not the only one. A couple of other people have reported problems. Over at iaudiophile.net shotofadds speculated that the power supply might not be shutting down properly, resulting in a spike in voltage which the card can't handle. He also said it might be something else entirely.

You might be advised not to use valuable cards until he finds/fixes this problem. That being said I've been using an A-data 16gb (class 6) card for the past 3 days without any problems. Although recently I've been removing the card before I shut it down and waiting till rockbox boots up before inserting it.

[shotofadds]

The reason for thinking the above is that there seems to be no problem using cards in Rockbox continuously for long periods of time. Several people have run battery_bench tests which involve both reading and writing to the card periodically over a long time frame (eg. 18 hours). That suggests to me that the problem is either at startup (unlikely since the card works) or at shut down.

This also fits reports that people have encountered card corruption after initialising the database - which requires a reboot.

I do know that we power off the player differently to the Cowon firmware. We power off by telling the power management chip (PCF50606) to enter sleep mode, which cuts most of the internal power supplies. After writing some config files, the Cowon firmware mutes the audio codec, turns the lcd and backlight off, and then clears a GPIO (A7) and enters an inifite loop. It doesn't seem to write anything to the PCF except to turn the backlight off.

I will do some testing to see if we should be using the same mechanism.

@funman, FAT16 will do too. Just not FAT12.

[3amsleep]

WOW, Congrats Shotofadds on the SDHC driver!.

Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work with the only SD card I have now (a 256mb sandisk), the card mounts the player loads rockbox but then I think the conection with the card is lost somehow because the .rockbox dir on the card is lost (maybe the card unmounts?) and I get the "failsafe" mode.

[shotofadds]

Is it possible you're using an SD-enabled bootloader but a version of rockbox.zip that doesn't support SD?

The most recent builds (since r21999) do not have the SD driver enabled, for safety reasons.

[3amsleep]

Is it possible you're using an SD-enabled bootloader but a version of rockbox.zip that doesn't support SD?

The most recent builds (since r21999) do not have the SD driver enabled, for safety reasons.

yeah I heard about that so I tried an older version.

Sorry my mistake, I thought it was an older version. Yep it works fine with an older version, thanks =).

[hpfmn]

Hey it works really nice for me I really appreciate your work!

I'm just a bit afraid because I don't want to loose my card even it is just maybe something about 20€...

I hope you guys will find out what is wrong - if I can help in any way just tell me. keep up the good work

[shotofadds]

I've posted an SD-enabled build over in the Official Testing Builds forum. Please use that thread to report back any successes/failures using SD cards in Rockbox.

I've made a couple of changes which should hopefully help: we now power off the player using the same mechanism as the Cowon firmware, and there was also a problem where the power management chip could cut the power while Rockbox was still shutting down - and this could potentially have been while writing files to the SD card.

[grantmasterflash]

Wanted to see if anyone has heard of this problem, has any ideas on what could be causing it, or knows what I could enable to debug it:

(I'm using shotofadds' official testing build with the SD driver, but this is unrelated to SD driver.  None of the files I'm referring to are on the SD card and I've noticed this problem with all Rockbox builds I've tried over the past few months).

I listen to mostly flac on my 16GB D2.  Every now and then I will be playing a track that suddenly abends due to some unknown error and the playback jumps immediately to the next track in the playlist.  I can recreate the problem over and over again at the same time point in whatever track exhibits the problem.  Rebooting Rockbox has no effect - the problematic track will stop playback at the same point and jump to the next even after many restarts. 

If I boot into the standard D2 firmware, the track will play without a problem (no skips).

I've found that I can fix the playback problem in Rockbox by deleting the problematic flac file from the D2 and then simply copying the file back from my PC to the D2 (so no change whatsoever to the file).

This happens with files that have metadata and that have no metadata (vorbis tags), so seems unrelated to that.

The problem has happened with many different files - for example, one album track with Vorbis tags that I ripped from CD, one live bootleg track with no Vorbis tags that I downloaded from a live performance torrent site, etc.  The other day a file encountered the error at about 3:40 into the track, another at 2:30, etc.  I find no common factor uniting the tracks that exhibit the problem, except that they have all been copied from my Ubuntu box onto the D2.

I don't listen to many mp3 files or other formats, so I can't say whether it is specific to flac or not, although I have not noticed the problem occurring with any format other than flac so far.

The fact that I can fix it by deleting the file from the D2 and copying it anew from my PC makes me wonder if it has to do with some fragmentation of the D2's internal memory that Rockbox doesn't like...  I don't know - I'm shooting in the dark.

[shotofadds]

The fact that I can fix it by deleting the file from the D2 and copying it anew from my PC makes me wonder if it has to do with some fragmentation of the D2's internal memory that Rockbox doesn't like...  I don't know - I'm shooting in the dark.

Do these files play reliably if you play them from the SD card?

If so, the problem is most likely due to incorrect file data being read from the internal flash. There are almost certainly bugs left in our implementation of the NAND FTL (flash translation layer), and since FLACs tend to be rather large files they are likely to show this kind of problem more often than other formats.

Edit to add: Now we have semi-reliable SD access it should be much easier to debug NAND issues, however it's unlikely I'll find the time to look into this for a while.