Newish battery & new hard drive but no now power for my iriver h340

[mrreck]

Hi
I was wondering if anyone can help suggest any options to try. 3 years ago i bought an extended ipod battery for my 10 year old iriver h340. Followed these instructions with no problems and got the machine up running well for a good while. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HOnpHSgMvw&feature=player_embedded#!

Then it seemed that the hard drive had unrepairable sectors and that the battery wasnt holding charge as well as expected. I figured this maybe settings in rockbox, or some problem with hard drive so i bought the 80 gig hard drive and using the above video fitted that. Now the iriver wont start at all.

Im pretty sure the battery was having less and less power so im not sure if thats totally out of juice now. The charger and plugging it in via usb isnt powering the unit, and i'm not sure where the problem lies or how to test the parts. I could buy another battery and try and fit that but i thought it would be better to try and find some help first.

Is there any way to test the charger, the battery, the hard drive and the connectors and/or firmware inside to determine where the problem lies? (< And if so what equipment would i need?)

And my other question is - from reading the above does it indicate that the charger is likely to be at fault or that the battery has totally lost all of its power within the 3 years of on and off usage, or that there might be a wrong connection or more internal fault. If there were some tests i could do while im inside the rockbox to save having to take apart and put together each time that would be really helpful too.

There are some answers on mystic river coming up in google but the site seems inaccessible due to the phising warnings at the mo.

Many thanks for any help you can offer.

[mrreck]

Update - just in case anyone has similar issues. I bought a new battery and a new hard drive, and wasnt getting any life in the iriver after a good 12 hours charge Then tested the charger with volt meter and confirmed it was working. So tried leaving it for long charge both on ac and then plugged into usb on my laptop. After a good while longer today it flickered on! went into low battery so didnt last long but then plugged into usb and has been getting a decent charge since.

I think the fault was to do with the connection between the charging port and the motherboard. Its a little loose so maybe that hasnt been charging. I know the usb charge can take a long time, so if anyone finds themselves in a similar position, leave it to charge as long as poss and then hopefully it will get enough charge to get to boot via usb.

All the best

[christopher]

As an update, I had a problem with my H340 where I left it on for an extended period of time and it ran its battery completely flat. It's an extended battery (fitted by previous owner), has something like a 1500/1600 mAh capacity.

Anyway, I'm also running an older version of Rockbox (r18607-3.0-080923) (!) which may have bugs pertaining to this behaviour which have subsequently been fixed, but I suspect I'm not the only person who hasn't upgraded their software (I kept this older version as I didn't want to recode the WPS theme used on this unit which was apparently broken with the RB update immediately after the that version).

I found that the unit would boot up into the default iRiver firmware and display the charging logo as before when plugged into the mains adapter - but unplugging the device, even after an entire night of charging, would result in immediate power off and the unit wouldn't turn on. Either the charging circuit in the battery's died or the unit wasn't actually charging.

However, plugging the unit into a USB charger AND simultaneously plugging in the AC adapter resulted in the bootloader mode appearing - and from there, it just required a little swift timing in order to trick the device into loading the RB bootloader (and not the default iRiver firmware). The unit's now loaded into the RB interface and is charging from the mains adapter. If it doesn't hold a charge after I unplug it this evening, I'll try again with the USB adapter and see if it's the device (or battery) that's faulty.

Update soon. What I wanted to say overall was that the H340 is 'unusual' about how it behaves under low charge conditions; the behaviour and loading precedence of the iRiver and Rockbox firmwares can also sometimes be a source of consternation if you don't have both adapters to hand :-)