iriver H120 and rockbox problem

[kpapr1]

Hello,

Yesterday I almost bricked an H120 twice for no reason. This is what happened:

I have rockboxed around 30 (yes, thirty) iriver so please don't assume I don't know what I am doing. So, yesterday I flashed rockbox into a working iriver. The procudure ended sucessfully and iriver automatically switched off. Then, when I pressed the power button to power up the unit I was in for a big surprise. The backlight came on but that was all that happened, no boot. When I released the power button, the unit switched off, so the unit did not hold the power on with a press of the power button, I had to hold the button myself. The HDD light was coming on and off in a cycle of around 5 seconds, maybe the unit was in a reset cycle. Sometimes it would start printing on the screen a few letters or words from the initial boot screen.

This morning I pressed and held the power button once again and to my surprise the initial boot screen slowly came up. After a while it quickly showed a fail message and then booted the original iriver firmware. I grabbed the opportunity and flashed the original firmware in. The unit worked fine until I decided to have another try of flashing rockbox. The result was failure again with the same results and bevahior, except no boot letters or words at all this time. I openeed the unit and at some point I accidentally short-circuited some pins from the LT3405 regulator (1.8V) and after that the iriver booted to the original firmware. I again flashed the original firmware. I am not willing to take another change, I got lucky twice already, but I am curious, why this iriver doesn't work with rockbox. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Costas 

[Llorean]

Considering you didn't even give the error message you got, it's going to be difficult to help you.

The whole point of error messages is to help give a clue where things are going wrong.

Basically, the general answer here is simply "there's something wrong with the hardware."

[kpapr1]

I would very much like to give you the error number, but it appeared only for a small fraction of time and I wasn't able to see it, as it soon afterwards showed the logo screen of the original firmware. I only managed to see a minus sign in front of the error.

This iriver was damaged from usage of wrong changer, but I fixed it (replaced the LT3405-1.8V) and it works perfectly with the original firmware.

I don't think there is something wrong with the hardware. I had another iriver that had problem with the correct reading of the hold switch at power-up only. When I installed botloader 7 the problem was solved. I don't have anything against rockbox, the contrary I would say, but I think that the hardware is being used aggressively and now that the hardware is old and the power supplies have degraded, a recosideration of the wait stages at power-up would not hurt. I mean it's better to take 1 second more to boot than not being able to boot at all. Maybe the time has come for an updated bootloader that can be installed like bootloader 6.