Support and General Use > Hardware
iRiver H120 CF Mod Attempt - Success!
AlexG:
I love my iRiver but I am not a huge fan of moving parts so I wanted to see if I could replace the hard drive with flash drive. I purchased a CF to 50 pin IDE adapter on ebay a while back to try and see if it was possible.
The adapter has a very large jumper on the front that is taller than everything else. I am pretty sure I am going to have to trim that if this works
Side by side next to the broken drive i pulled out of my iRiver. You can see the jumper in this picture on the front right edge.
More of the adapter/jumper from the side
Here is another shot from the front with the CF card inserted
Here is another side by side shot from the side. You can really see how big that jumper is here.
Another shot from the side
Here I laid the adapter on top of the broken drive.
I cracked open the iRiver put the adapter and cf card on and turned the unit on.
The drive came up as a usb device like it should! so I started copying the rockbox files over
This took a long time, but I'm using a crappy CF card for now as a proof of concept.
Now for the moment of truth will it boot?
No :(
It froze at the bootloader screen and now the thing won't even turn on with the old hard drive :( I'm not sure what happened but I'll see if I can break it from it's slumber but I'm not very happy right now...
Edit - Ok a reset of the device brought it back with the old Hard Drive still trying to get it to boot the flash drive
Edit2 - Swapping the CF card with anothter one fixed my problem and it booted!
Davide-NYC:
Now that it has been a few days since your CF conversion I was wondering if you have noticed any problems? Does it 'work like a charm'? If so what CF card worked well? What were the specs? Thanks for trying this out!
Chronon:
Please post this information to the wiki so that others can find it easily. Tutorials and other static information are better kept on the wiki.
scharkalvin:
I have the exact same adapter in my gigabeat. I used a 16gb A-Data cf flash card from NewEgg.com ($105). It came up as a usb device and I was able to install rockbox by creating the required directories and coping over the software files. I saved the system files from a working gigabeat OF and copied them over (only two files needed I think).
It seems to work, but sometimes I get disk read errors. Did you comment out the sleep function in ATA.c? This was required for iPod mini's using a CF card and I did that on my gigabeat. I also set the spindown time to 254 seconds (I'd like to modify the code so it is NEVER).
Let me know if you decide to get that A-Data CF card (it's the cheapest 16GB I could find, and it worked great in an iPod mini.) Sometime next year they will have a 32gb model out (hopefully for under $200). That would be nice...... :-)
adam917:
--- Quote from: scharkalvin on December 09, 2007, 01:36:14 PM ---I have the exact same adapter in my gigabeat. I used a 16gb A-Data cf flash card from NewEgg.com ($105). It came up as a usb device and I was able to install rockbox by creating the required directories and coping over the software files. I saved the system files from a working gigabeat OF and copied them over (only two files needed I think).
It seems to work, but sometimes I get disk read errors. Did you comment out the sleep function in ATA.c? This was required for iPod mini's using a CF card and I did that on my gigabeat. I also set the spindown time to 254 seconds (I'd like to modify the code so it is NEVER).
Let me know if you decide to get that A-Data CF card (it's the cheapest 16GB I could find, and it worked great in an iPod mini.) Sometime next year they will have a 32gb model out (hopefully for under $200). That would be nice...... :-)
--- End quote ---
32 GB is out now: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211244
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version