[Solved]: Looking for help: iRiver H140 with Toshiba MK2431GAH

[DTSyX]

[For the solution I found and that works for me, see some posts further down: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,28808.msg186099.html#msg186099]


Hi, especially to the guys who already succeeded at the quest I'm currently on!

The problem I have has been described already, several times, but not really solved, at least not published to the public as far as I could find out via the forum search.

And this just isn't true, at least for me:

Support for large disks is included in Rockbox 3.6 and current builds.

Why not? Well, I have Rockbox 3.9.1 installed on my H140 and still get that "ATA error: -32" message.

So I guess one has to use a patched bootloader. But if this problem is to solved by inserting something like "#define HAVE_LBA48" into the bootloader (-> patched firmware) code it should be the same for all H140s out there and only one person needs to do it and can upload this bootloader here for all others to download. Or am I wrong?

I wonder: If some people are said to have succeeded why haven't they published their solution?


Well, that's what I've done and far I've come:

See the pictures to see what adapter I used with the Toshiba MK2431GAH.

I used the FAT32formatter (quickformat) to format the disk.

After installing Rockbox, iRiver OS can read the disk and data, but Rockbox gives me that "ATA error: -32" message.

So, I guess "all" I need would be a / that patched bootloader, right?

That's why I would like to asked the guys who have a large hdd running on their H140 to come out of the closet and tell us how they did it, i.e.:

1. Is a current version of rockbox really enough to get the disk running or is some bootloader patching still necessary?

2a. If the latter is true and the bootloader should be the same for all H140 on this planet, could someone please upload it to the iRiver port section for download?

3b. If no bootloader patching is necessary, what might I have done wrong?


I think I'm pretty close to having the best iRiver possible so I would very appreciate the help from the people who knew already years ago what to do to make this project working!

So, sorry for bringing that topic up again, and thanks for your kind help!

And sorry in advance if I did some stupid mistake while the solution would have been very simple and right in front of my eyes!

Sincerly,

DTSyX

[torne]

No patches are required, but there has not been a bootloader release for the iRivers since the change was made. The current bootloader code for those devices is broken and if you build and install it you will no longer be able to boot your player. We don't know why this is (it has been broken a while) and it's difficult to fix as only a few people have the ability to recover these devices after a bad bootloader has been installed; it requires special hardware.

Your best bet is to find a pre-existing binary somewhere that somebody built in the past which incorporates the patch already and which has already been used by someone else so you know it works. It's not possible for anyone to build you a current bootloader without risking bricking your player.

[DTSyX]

Well, thanks for your reply.

You're basically suggesting what I implied with my post: To get at least one of the successful heroes out of the closet to share his/her build with the rest of us.
So I thought I'd have a good shot asking via the forum of the community/group that created the phenomenal rockbox in the first place. :-)

Well, if only a few people have the ability to recover these devices then there ARE at least some out there who can!

And by the way:

What is that ominous hardware that is needed to recover a dead iRiver (or maybe any similar electronic device), what is it called? What type of device is it?
If I'm right, the device (and the person operating it) has to be able to access the SST 39VF160 Flash ROM, right? (Just to et clear on the principle.
Maybe I can find someone who has such a device, but just for a totally different reason and he / she can offer me the opportunity to make the step and try patching myself. But without backup strategy I'm not brave enough / willing to risk the life of my H140 by trying something I've no experience with.

But the best way would just be if only one successful person would step forward and share his oder her file with the rockbox community. I know I would if I were capable of such a task.

On the other hand, when you say that fixing the broken bootloader is difficult then it really must be, because building a working bootloader in the first place seems a huge thing to me. But it exists. So, if those guys aren't able to fix that particular problem it sounds bigger than just simply adding some LBA48-line to the code as I've read in some other threads, at least not for the iriver port. Just trying to get an idea of how big the task really is... :-)
OR: The responsible guys for the booloader just don't have a spare iRiver (anymore) for testing and that mysterious device for reanimation, respectively. Then it would be not so much a problem of knowledge and solutions but of opportunity...

Well, anyway. Thanks though for the rockbox idea as a whole and the support.

And thanks for any genious who might come up and out with a working binary! :-)

[torne]

What is that ominous hardware that is needed to recover a dead iRiver (or maybe any similar electronic device), what is it called? What type of device is it?
If I'm right, the device (and the person operating it) has to be able to access the SST 39VF160 Flash ROM, right? (Just to et clear on the principle.
Maybe I can find someone who has such a device, but just for a totally different reason and he / she can offer me the opportunity to make the step and try patching myself. But without backup strategy I'm not brave enough / willing to risk the life of my H140 by trying something I've no experience with.

You need a BDM wiggler.

The current bootloader code is *definitely* broken; there is no point trying it at all, even if you have the ability to recover the device, unless you actually have some idea how to go about fixing it. It is guaranteed not to work.

Anyway, yes, hopefully someone has a bootloader binary that works and has LBA48 enabled; I didn't mean to imply nobody can help, just that nobody can build one for you now; it needs to be one they already built a long time ago (it's probably been broken for a year or more...)

[iRiverer]

Wow, what a timing!
I strongly want to support the search for the heroes with the good bootloader

Happens I bought me a Toshiba MK1634GAL to work with my iRiver H140, which arrived 2 days ago. My experience is the same as for DTSyX, the original iRiver firmware recognizes the drive just fine, but with rockbox I get a ATA error: -32.

I tried a lot of things in these 2 days to get it working: opened/closed the player several times, switched with my old drive, put different firmware versions on it, reformated the drive... All with no success and partly with a very bad feeling cause the reset button of my iRiver is not working all the time so I never was sure I could reset after errors (after connecting to the computer or the -32 error you have to reset the device)
I almost thought I have a bad drive and considered buying another one, but luckily now I spoted this thread by chance.

Unluckily, no answer from one of these heroes by now.
But like you wrote, there should be a couple of people outside which were able to get a large drive working.
If someone has a working bootloader for DTSyX, would he be kind enough to also send it to me? This would be very much appreciated.

[torne]

If someone has such a binary we can probably host it somewhere for download until a proper fix can be found; given that we now enable LBA48 for all hard disk based players anyway, this is a patch that we don't mind

[DTSyX]

You need a BDM wiggler.

Thanks for the info!

The current bootloader code is *definitely* broken; there is no point trying it at all, even if you have the ability to recover the device, unless you actually have some idea how to go about fixing it. It is guaranteed not to work.

I'm not planning to try right now. But if time moves on and there's still no binary coming up, I guess, now that I have the new drive and can't really use, I might grow an urge to try - given I had the assurance of being able to reanimate my drive. But right now that I have absolutely no idea what I would be doing there's no such urge whatsoever... :-)

Anyway, yes, hopefully someone has a bootloader binary that works and has LBA48 enabled; I didn't mean to imply nobody can help, just that nobody can build one for you now; it needs to be one they already built a long time ago (it's probably been broken for a year or more...)

Well, I was never thinking of someone building a bootloader just for me. Given the fact that this problem was talked about already in 2009 I thought there just MUST be such an bootloader out there somewhere...  :'(


*knock knock knock*
Heroes?

*knock knock knock*
Heroes?

*knock knock knock*
Heroes?

[iRiverer]

Well, I have seen that in this forum someone was able to use a 240 GB drive with a H340 with an selfbuilt bootloader. The post is over a year ago:
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,24215.msg163767.html#msg163767

Unluckily, the guy hasn't posted since then and I tried to write him an email, but got an error.
So I wrote him an PM, asking if he would be so kind to send me his bootloader. But I'm not sure he will read it, since he hasn't logged in since a year.
I suppose theres no other way to contact him?

So we just can wait and hope.

[torne]

The bootloader linked in his post is for an H300, but you could *probably* build a bootloader for H120 from the same revision of the source (applying the LBA48 patch) and it would hopefully work. He had r17607M-080522 so it's probably okay to check out r17607 from SVN, patch it to support large disks, and flash it (though we still can't guarantee that it's safe...)

If you do try this, let us know if it works. If the answer is that it doesn't, then, er, it's possible someone can recover it for you, but you may have to ship the device internationally :p

[iRiverer]

Uh, the possibility of bricking the player and having to ship it internationaly is pretty pretty pretty scaring me...
Damn, think I have to wait some more time for heroes that already tried it.

[DTSyX]

Eureka!!!!

I found a solution to the large HDD problem on the H140!

Just a few minutes ago I found the following thread:

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,27190.msg185957.html#msg185957


The user TriTL mentions the bootloader 7pre4 which can be found for download here:

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IriverFlashing#Issues_with_the_bootloader


Just as explained here

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IriverFlashing#Upgrading_the_bootloader

I just copied the bootloader.iriver file into my .iriver folder on my iriver (with the original hdd still installed, of course), long pressed the joystick and selected iriver_flash as executing plugin. Then there came a message asking if I wanted to install/flash, and I pressed "play" to confirm. After a few seconds there was a "success" info.

That's it, that's all.

After installing the new hdd the player booted like usually and I can finally use my H140 with that monster with 240GB! Finally using the H140 as a FLAC-player has come reality for me. No more crappy low res ogg (which was still ok) or having to use the iriver-OS with it's limitations to the number of files and folders which make it practically impossible to use it as a 240GB-player.


So, thanks again to the Rockbox developers in general for that great liberation for music players and a special thanks to TriTL for bringing that solution to my attention!

Regards,

DTSyX

[iRiverer]

First of all, thx DTSyX for spreading the good news that one can use larger Harddrives.

I did the procedure, but sadly I encountered problems. Now I'm not sure if something went wrong with the flashing procedure or the bootloader is buggy, I mean, its a pre Release.

After the flashing, I installed my new hdd. It booted fine, but because i had nothing installed on it except rockbox, no music was on it to test. So I plugged it to my computer, and restored a backup of my old hdd on it with all my music. Than I installed rockbox new with the rockbox installer. The iRiver booted, but I think the Theme was the standard Theme and I think the standard font was used. And all was in English, before I had german on it. So I tried to change the settings, but when I went on languages for example, I pushed the navi on it, the red light flickered but nothing else happened. Very strange. So I wanted to test the music playback, but when I went on a mp3 file, a message of this kind appeared:
"*Panic* dir entry 2 in sector 5 failed". Luckily I could reset via the play button (my reset button seems not to be working anymore ).
So I restartet, but I got the same error message every time I tried to play music, I tested it with different mp3's.

After error checking the disk (no errors), I copied the original rockbox folder (also version 3.9.1) from my old hdd to the new hdd. This time, I have my old theme, language is german and the music plays fine. But there still seems to be problems.
Wenn I navigate through the menues, the navi is not always working correctly. Sometimes when I push down, the cursor does nothing. On other times, the menues switch without me pushing any buttons. And when I want to activate automatic resume, the player says the database is not ready and if I want to initialize it. But the automatic resume should have nothing to do with the database!?

DTSyX, do you have similar problems? Can anyone tell me, what the reason may be? Could it be the new bootloader?
Before restoring the backup, I formated the new hdd with fat32, and sectorsize 4092. Was this correct or can the error lie there?
And strangely, I have seen that the hdd has 2 partitons on it, the one I use which has almost all the 160GB, and another one with only 10 Megabyte, it says not in use. I wanted to get rid of it, but I didn't know how, so I didn't touch it. Could this be another source of the error?

And a last question, DTSyX, have you loaded the rockbox into your ROM or RAM, like it is said in the guide you linked? It says it has advantages, but I don't know what they are exactly, for now I still start rockbox from hdd.
Post Merge: November 17, 2011, 11:14:13 AMIt's getting more and more strange.

Rockbox doesn't seem to care which settings I make. They are shown in the settings menu, but take no effect.
And the navi seems to take actions of its own. Can anyone help me plz?

[DTSyX]

Ok,

sorry you experience such problems. I hope they get solved!

As for the 10MB partition. I'm not sure what the correct technical explanation is, but it's by design. Might have something to do with the FAT32 file system.


As for the problems. I havent't experienced such problems so far. I've hardly used the player for actual listening as I'm currently about to reencode all my cds to the flac format.
But I had some freezing. But that also happened before, so I'm not really concerned. And I'm also not surprised as it is a pre-version of a bootloader. I noticed some lagging sometimes (looked like the player froze, but after a while he reacted again).


I used the fat32formatter to format the hdd. Then I copied all the files from the original hdd. That was at the time, when I learned that doing just that won't get rockbox running on the large drive. And now I just copied the bootloader file into the .rockbox folder and "flashed" it. That's all.
I didn't do anything else. So no copying "the roxbox into ROM or RAM".

My setting are still the same as on the original drive, and I changed them a lot, created my own theme and so on.

But if settings get mixed up, I'd check the "line of command" or simply delete the .rockbox folder and install rockbox again. When I say "line of command" I think of checking config.cfg, see if the files it points to are all there, also in the right place, not write protected, no typos, then checking each of these files. Perhaps one of these got screwed up and only contains crappy characters (compare to the original hdd to see what each should look like).


Sorry, I can't help you more. But that not only means that I'm not one of the pros here, but also that I have none of those problems myself, yet. So there might be hope.

I'd say, if the flashing process went without errors, then it's "just" a problem of the "rockbox-os", meaning something is not right within the .rockbox folder rather than something being wrong with the player itself, i.e. RAM, ROM. But that's just my guess.

I hope, You'll get the problem solved quick, easy and painless.

DTSyX

[iRiverer]

Thanks for your reply.

Good to know the 10MB Partition is normal, one potential error source eliminated. I used fat32 formater to for formating the drive, too. Do you remember which sector size you chose? As I said, I used 4096, and I'm still fearing this might be another source of error, but I don't want to format again on suspection and recopy, because this is a very time consuming process.

The line of command checking is a good idea, I will do that when I am at windows PC to which I can connect the iRiver. But I am not very hopefull in this, because I copied the rockbox folder from my old hdd so it will probably be alright.

Reinstalling rockbox is another possibility, but like I wrote, when I installed it, I had much more problems and errors, since I copied the folder over I can at least listen to my music.
Btw is it normal that it takes almost 20 minutes to copy the rockbox folder? It has about 2800 files and 56MB, it seems a bit long for this little amount of data.

As for the screwed up navigation in the menu, the more I think about it, the more I'm afraid the navi may got broken when I opened the player to switch the hdd. But I just switched the hdd, did nothing else, and I switched it in the past a few times without any problems.
How likely is it to screw the navi by opening the player?

[DTSyX]

I think 20 minutes for transferring just 56MB is definitively too much. In that amount of time I transferred 10-20GB.

But maybe here's you problem: I just checked my drive. The sector size of that partition is 512 bytes. When checking fat32formatter right now, I don't see anywhere an option to select the sector size...

Not sure if you could damage the joystick by just exchanging the hdd. I did this several times, nothing ever happend.