dual boot to rhapsody firmware

[advcomp2019]

Xoring, I have got my Sansa e280R dual booting with Rockbox and the e200R firmware just fine.

[xoring]

I realize that *some* people have it working fine, but I haven't gotten it to work properly and it seems like others are having the same problem. It's very convenient to call us idiots and say that we're doing something wrong or we didn't read the instructions or something. But I'd say you're wrong. I've been using Slackware as my primary OS for over 6 years. I'm not new to Linux or programming or following instructions. I followed ALL of the instructions exactly and even repeated it several times with different versions of the firmware to rule that out as a possibility. I have been unable to get it to work the way it's supposed to and I find responses like "It works for me, you're doing something wrong" to be dismissive and unhelpful. If you're not going to contribute toward a solution, at least acknowledge that other people might know what they are doing and might be reporting legitimate bugs even if your particular hardware doesn't experience the same issues.

[alaron]

I haven't got my E280R properly dual-booting into the original firmware either and I'm no idiot. There has to be a difference somewhere because I followed those instructions exactly.

It's either an assumption that some people make or some hardware difference that invalidates the scheme...

Thing is that I would really love to be able to still use the R firmware since I think it's better than the nonR one.

[Bagder]

Since it seems people have trouble on the plain e200 as well with the recent bootloaders, I'm assuming this is a problem that is real and that happens to both e200 and e200R owners. Possibly there are variations that make it work on some and not on others.

So if we can find out when in time it broke on the e200, we should be able to fix this. If not, we should be able to make a e200R bootloader based on the code from where the e200 one worked and try that on the e200R players...

[alaron]

Please let me know if I can help somehow to find the solution for this issue.
Do you think I should try re-doing the whole patching procedure again?

ty

[Bagder]

Ok, here's a test for you:

1. Get the SVN sources for 2007-07-31

2. Apply the R model bootloader keys in bootloader/main-pp.c from a recent source

3. Build a bootloader

4. Install this bootloader and see if it dual-boots better

5. Report what happened, success or not

[alaron]

I'm leaving work now but I'll try doing that tomorrow and will let you now if I was successful or not

[xoring]

Ok, here's a test for you:

1. Get the SVN sources for 2007-07-31

2. Apply the R model bootloader keys in bootloader/main-pp.c from a recent source

3. Build a bootloader

4. Install this bootloader and see if it dual-boots better

5. Report what happened, success or not

I was trying to follow your advice but I'm not really an expert at this stuff so please help me out a little.

1. I did: svn co svn://svn.rockbox.org/rockbox/trunk -r {2007-07-31} rockbox

2. The tea_keytable variable already has an entry for "rhapsody", and it's the same key as the bootloader/main-pp.c from the current trunk. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to "Apply" here.

3. I ran ../tools/configure and told it to make an e200r bootloader. make ran fine, no errors.

4. This is where I got stuck. I have a 'pp5022.mi4' in the build directory and a 'bootloader.bin' and 'bootloader.elf' in the build/bootloader directory. I read over the E200R instructions for patching the bootloader but that document just gives you steps to follow, it doesn't tell you what the different files are so I'm a little lost now as to what to do with the files I'm looking at.

5. Obviously, not results so far...

[alaron]

I thought there was somebody who already did the regression testing and identified the change at fault, didn't he? That's why some people were waiting for the developers to see the problem and try to address it...

Guys, please tell me if I am wrong!

ty

[Bagder]

The pp5022.mi4 from step 4 is the Rockbox bootloader.

[lights0ut]

Just got a e280 outta futureshop for $150 CAD for the purpose of rockboxing it.

So far I've been able to follow the instructions like usual, I have rockbox installed, but
when I go to load the Sansa Firmware, I see text printed, and then the screen fades to white, fades to black and my player hangs. I have tried a couple of other .mi4's from Bagder's site, but I still get the same problem.
Any help is as always greatly appreciated, thanks

EDIT:
had a look around the bug tracker and found this: http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/7806
and links to a forum thread on this subject. (http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=12762.60)

I've used sansa patcher 0.2 to load the older bootloader and things are working nicely.

@mods: please merge my post or lock this thread, thanks

[xoring]

Success!!!

Well, mostly.
Using the pp5022.mi4 file that I compiled from the revision you suggested I can successfully dual-boot. However the top two rows of pixels are corrupted for both Rockbox and the rhapsody firmware. For the moment, the minor screen corruption isn't a problem though.

Update: I'm posting a link to the pp5022.mi4 that worked for me. Maybe it will work for others who are having the same problem.

ftp://wisard.no-ip.com/pp5022.mi4

[alaron]

Hey Xoring

Have you applied any patches to your source code? A fix for those corrupted pixels might be in one of the patches. Where you able to dual-boot a Rhapsody player or just a nonR with your bootloader? If it was a non-Rhapsody..I thought that was already working.

I've built a bootloader myself but I can't try it because I forgot the cable at home

ty

[Bagder]

Nice work xoring,

The display bug is fixed in the current bootloader but it wasn't back in the version which you're using right now.

It seems it is the added microsdhc support that broke the OF loading in the current bootloader. And since we don't even need microsd support in the bootloader, we should probably try to just disable that in the most recent svn code and see if that makes it run fine again.

There's just this little problem not all people experience the hanging problem, and within this latter category there seem to be several Rockbox devs!

[xoring]

alaron: I was working on a Rhapsody player loading a Rhapsody firmware. My non-Rhapsody player never had any issue booting the OF.

Bagder: Since I seem to have an affected Rhapsody player on hand I'd be happy to test code for you guys to make sure everything works for all users.