Creative ZEN

[richq]

Would that apply for the Creative Zen Mozaic? There are a lot of models called "Zen", so I'm not sure. I have a Zen Mozaic gathering dust in a drawer that I'd resurrect if it could be made to run Rockbox :-)

[pamaury]

Hello, this thread is for the Creative ZEN only, I have created a new thread for the Mozaic, feel free to post on it.

[chrisjj]

I'm the owner of four Creative ZENs and would REALLY love to have Rockbox on them.

If there's any developer here that needs support for this, do say.

[pamaury]

Hello chrijj,
I already did quite a bit of reverse engineering on the Creative ZEN, but I'm missing the device to actually program something. Someone started to do the work but he disappeared. If you want to help, maybe you can send me one device (i'll send it back when it's done).
Thanks for your interest

[chrisjj]

Amaury, sounds good.  - thanks. I can't spare any of my own units so I'll buy another and send it over to you. Please let me know your postal address by PM.

[hamstarr]

I'd like to help if possible I really like to see Rockbox on my Zen..

I can do a little c, own a Zen and have a build environment ready. So if I need to lend a hand, just let me know.

[chrisjj]

... I'll buy another and send it over to you.

FTR, this was done that week.

[hamstarr]

Grand! What a great move! 

[pamaury]

Hi all,
the great day has finally arrived: you can beta test Rockbox on the ZEN! Before doing that, you must be aware that this is a preliminary software and as such it might not work at all, break your device, destroy the world, ... the usual stuff

More seriously though, there is a big issue at the moment which cannot really be solved: Rockbox and the Creative OS share the same disk space but do not use the same file system. Consequently, one cannot use Rockbox without reformating the entire disk use the FAT file system, which will prevent the Creative OS from working, and conversely if you reformat the disk for Creative OS, you cannot use Rockbox.

To sum up: if you want to use Rockbox, you will have to reformat the internal disk of the device and you will loose all your data ! Note that the SD card will not be touched.

Now if you still want to do that, go to http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CreativeZENPort and follow the instruction. I prebuilt the bootloader and the windows tools to perform the installation. Once the bootloader is installed, plug your device: the rockbox bootloader will appear and show up as a USB disk. If you are under Windows, it will notify you that the disk is unusable and you should reformat it using FAT. If you are under Linux, use your favourite method to reformat it.

Once the bootloader is installed and the disk formatted (you only need to do that once), you can install/update rockbox by downloading the nightly build here: http://build.rockbox.org/data/rockbox-creativezen.zip : unpack it at the root of your device, it should produce a .rockbox directory.

Please only reports serious issues: this is a preliminary software and thus many things are suboptimal at this point.

[chrisjj]

Great news! Well done, Amaury.

I tried on Windows XP SP2 and got as far as:

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CreativeZENPort

Formatting for Rockbox
...
The device should appear as a Mass Storage device in your host.

It did not. Windows reported finding new hardware and asked for OS restart, but after than no new hardware is showing in the usual place (My Computer).

The ZEN screen shows "Bootloader USB mode" and other lines, inc. a changing "Die temp: " line. This machine successfully connects to the Creative-firmwared ZEN.

Any ideas?

[pamaury]

Ok maybe I should have written differently: Windows correctly detected your device as Mass Storage. I doesn't show in the usual place (MyComputer) because it not formatted. To do that, it depends on your Windows version but usually go to Settings > Computer Management > Disk Management (Windows 7) or Settings > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management (Windows XP). Just look up on google

[chrisjj]

Settings > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management (Windows XP)

Thanks. I do find it there: http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/9387/gstf.png as two Disks http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/9982/ryol.png http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1517/khm5.png.  Also FWIW I see it under Removable Storage, Media http://img849.imageshack.us/img849/2258/qiuz.png.

However Disk Management Format with default options reports failure: "The format did not complete successfully".  And the ZEN screen still says "No partition found", "Loading firmware", "File not found".
EDIT: Also, Explorer Format reports failure: http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/4720/vjxs.png
EDIT: workaround: use Explorer Format

• Quick Format. This succeeds (i.e. does not report failure).

EDIT 2013-12-06: This problem persists with bootloader V1Beta3_3f555f01. EDIT 2014-01-27: Verified on Win XP SP2 and SP3.
EDIT 2014-01-27: This problem has not shown in trials on Win7 and Mac OSX.

Perhaps related is the fact Windows shows this disk to be 3.63GB - half what I'd expect on this 8GB ZEN.
EDIT: Wrong size issue fixed: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,13462.msg221570.html#msg221570

Any ideas?

Has anyone else tried formatting with Windows?

[pamaury]

Hi,
someone reported success under Windows but he also has incorrect disk size and I myself get a 0 byte drive under Windows. It seems there is an issue with storage under Windows, I'll try to fix this asap.

[chrisjj]

Thanks Amaury. Perhaps success depends on storage capacity. EDIT: FWIW, I note the reduced disc size corresponds approximately to the FAT16 maximum of 4Gb.

[pamaury]

Hi again
after some investigation I found the problem (see below for the techies). So I'm going to completely change the way the disk size is computed because Creative basically screw up. I'll upload a new bootloader soon.

By the way, forgot to mention it: Rockbox currently doesn't charge over USB, so use the recovery mode to recharge.

Explaination of the problem:
Creative uses a custom partition table with a "total size" field which is 64-bit large, so theoretically it's fine, but in practice their format code must be broken and does the computation on 32-bit. As a result, the reported size is (disk size) modulo 2^32. For example, 16GB moduloe 2^32 = 3GB. I guess for some others values it could produce strange values. Thank you Creative.