Questions about the Gigabeat F

[scharkalvin]

I'm close to buying myself a gigabeat F player on ebay, so I was reading up on the Gigabeat port.  The only thing that has me worried is the section on how to restore a locked up player by opening it up and hw resetting the disk.  Just how often do these players get locked up?  Is it something I should worry about?

The repair procedure mentioned that the disk drive was a USB type drive, but it clearly is a 1.8" 50pin ata type drive which shouldn't be hot plugged.

Also from the hw description it appears that this player has both usb 1.1 and 2.0 connections (with the cradle only having usb 1.1)?  It also seems like you can't charge the player from usb and have to use a separate power cord to the player (or cradle)?  Finally this player seems to have a switch to TOTALLY power it off by disconnecting the battery?  Does that mean that it doesn't have a time of day clock?

[Mad Cow]

You only need to do the hot-swap trick if you really messed up something. You shouldn't worry about it if you're just installing rockbox. It has a USB 2.0 connector on the actual player itself, and on the back of the dock. The port on the side of the dock is USB 1.1, but it makes the gigabeat the USB host, so that you can plug any USB drive into it, but rockbox doesn't support it at the moment. You can charge through USB. And it does have an RTC (clock), it just resets every time you flip the switch.

You could've easily figured all this out through looking at the manual though, but I'm feeling generous.

[scharkalvin]

Thanks for the info.  
Some of what you said is probably somewhere in the rockbox manual for the gigabeat which I've skimmed, and the rest would be in the gigabeat's own manual which I don't have.  So long as the only way to 'brick' the player would be to delete the wrong files off the hard disk I should be ok.

[Mad Cow]

Even then it wouldn't brick it, and disassembly is incredibly easy for this player, so you should have no problems. I can take mine apart and do the hot-swap trick in less than a minute.

[scharkalvin]

I can take mine apart and do the hot-swap trick in less than a minute.

Other than battery replacement, have you ever had to?
(I've seen your post on replacement batteries else where.
BTW how did that work out?)

[Chronon]

To add another data point, I have never had to do the hot-swap trick.  I have needed to flip the battery switch on several occasions -- but these were all shortly after I installed Rockbox at a time when there was a bug causing the system to hang at shutdown.  I haven't had to do this in months.

[Mad Cow]

I can take mine apart and do the hot-swap trick in less than a minute.

Other than battery replacement, have you ever had to?
(I've seen your post on replacement batteries else where.
BTW how did that work out?)

I've had to when I was messing around with modifying and compiling the bootloader, and also when I was using a hacked version of Toshiba's bootloader. You don't have to do any of those things to get rockbox running.

The battery replacement went OK, I think I got a bad battery though, because it barely lasted longer than the original. I ordered a new one from a different place, hopefully that'll give me at least 20 hours.

[scharkalvin]

Sounds good.  I was looking for a player with a fair amount of storage space
and good battery life (>15 hours).  Used iPods are quite common but I understand
that battery life isn't too good yet with Rockbox on them.  Sounds like the
gigabeat might be a better choice.

One thought. With the iPods you can swap out a hard disk with a replacement fairly
easy because the on board firmware will let you gain access to the disk via the usb connection and load the necessary firmware using Apple's software or via DD with Linux.  Same for replacing an iPod hard disk with a CF module.  What about the
gigabeat?  How easy is it to get one going after replacing a hard disk (or replacing one with a CF)?  Anybody tried this?

[GodEater]

Replacing the hard disk is trivial - linuxstb is rocking an F80 now for example

No-one's tried doing a CF installation on one - why would you either? I'm not aware of +40GB CF cards, and the interface doesn't support it anyway.

[Mad Cow]

Sounds good.  I was looking for a player with a fair amount of storage space
and good battery life (>15 hours).  Used iPods are quite common but I understand
that battery life isn't too good yet with Rockbox on them.  Sounds like the
gigabeat might be a better choice.

One thought. With the iPods you can swap out a hard disk with a replacement fairly
easy because the on board firmware will let you gain access to the disk via the usb connection and load the necessary firmware using Apple's software or via DD with Linux.  Same for replacing an iPod hard disk with a CF module.  What about the
gigabeat?  How easy is it to get one going after replacing a hard disk (or replacing one with a CF)?  Anybody tried this?

If you have gigabeat room, it'll back up all of your original firmware onto your computer. All you have to do then is copy that folder to your gigabeat. A gigabeat would probably be your best choice for a rockbox player, and you can find brand new ones really cheap on ebay.

I've tried 2 CF card before, but none of them worked. Toshiba's bootloader got halfway before the screen just faded into weird colours. It might be because those 2 card don't support full ATA specs though.

[scharkalvin]

CF cards that will work with the ipod mini are available in sizes up to 16gb.
I bought one from newegg.com.  User feedback reviews on this particular card
from at least 5 people said they had been able to replace the hd in an iPod mini
(1g and 2g) with this very card, so I got one.  But the mini already uses a hard disk in this format.  Adapters that convert from the CF card pinout to the 50pin ata pinout
used on 1.8" drives are available.  But above 16GB it isn't cheap.
This will change, maybe this time next year a 32gb CF to hd mod would make sense.
Would make the battery last longer (which is why I plan to update my ipod mini.  Think I'll end up giving the mini to my wife though...)