Iriver H300: Boot rockbox without battery?

[ogtifs]

I am looking to set up my H300 as a permanent fixture in my car. I want to remove the battery and power the player from the car so that it will stop and start automatically when the car does. I have trialled removing the battery but when connecting the AC adapter the original iriver firmware boots (into "Charging...") instead of rockbox. How can I get it to do what I want? I'm ok with manually modifying the bootloader firmware if that's what it will require

Thanks for your help

[AlexP]

Be very very very very very careful editing the bootloaders on the H300 - if it is wrong then it will permanently break your player.  Current SVN is known broken.  I guess safest would be to check out the revision used to build the last release and modify that, but really there are no guarantees whatsoever.

[Multiplex]

Not wishing to dilute Alex's warning - but someone has managed to build hardware to recover a bricked iRiver H100 http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/H1x0Reflashing which uses the same CPU so if you d try this mod and it goes wrong it is maybe possible to recover the player after a lot of work.

It is a pity that empeg car never took off :-(

[AlexP]

Yes, you can recover them - you just need specialist  equipment (a BDM wiggler), which for most people means you can't.

[kostkoro]

I have trialled removing the battery but when connecting the AC adapter the original iriver firmware boots (into "Charging...") instead of rockbox. How can I get it to do what I want?

Maybe this will help. I have changed the hard disk of my H320 with a CF card following the excellent instructions from here:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CFModGuide.
Before the replacement I installed the special bootloader for this, (found in the above page) and I discovered that, when I connect the AC adapter, then the Rockbox loads and performs charging, or if you like, you can boot directly to it and play music. Which means that the original iRiver firmware does not take control automatically. (Of course the same situation happens with my CF card which I installed later).
I have to mention though, that at least one H300 user (from misticriver), who performed the same modification, reported that the original firmware still does the charging. I don't know the reason, I just inform you that my version of H320 is the European one.
Those where the days of Rockbox 2.xx but I have updated several times, now I am on 3.6, with no problem.