Rockbox beyond 3.9 will not playback songs on iRiver H120

[anselhelm]

Hi all,

Please forgive me if this is the incorrect section for this, though it does seem the most appropriate to me.

I have recently tried updating Rockbox on my ageing iRiver H120 from 3.9.1 to a newer release. Unfortunately with each newer release I am unable to get a single song to play: the player just skips right through them, no matter what filetype or tagging used.

I have tested mp3s, oggs, flacs and spcs, but beyond 3.9.1, they refuse to work.

Is there something that changed massively from 3.10 onwards?

Kind regards

[gevaerts]

That sounds like the codec files don't match the main binary. Are you sure you're actually running the newer build after installing it, or are you maybe running an older (presumably 3.9.1) flashed build?

[anselhelm]

As far as I know I'm running the newer build each time. Let me check.

[checks]

If I start my player with the hold button down, I get the following options:

Boot from disk
Boot RAM image
Boot ROM image [DEF]

I had presumed this was just the bootloader though and unrelated to the version of Rockbox that I wished to run. I'm running the modified bootloader (7pre4) for my H120 that allows the use of a CF card and have a 32GB CF card installed. Trying to boot from disk produces the -80 ATA error.

If this is the cause, is there a way around this?

Thanks in advance for any help you can render or information you can provide here

[saratoga]

Check the build number in rockbox's system menu.

[anselhelm]

Says 3.9.1.

I guess this shows my ignorance about how Rockbox works when it loads from RAM or ROM. I thought this was just the initial stages of booting, after which it would load the rest from the disk.

Am I correct that some jiggery pokery would be required to get this working?

[saratoga]

I think you just need to install the current build and then boot from it, either on disk if you installed it there, or in ROM if you installed it there.

[anselhelm]

Ah, I understand what you mean there.

The problem is that I cannot boot from disk as I'm using a CF card and alas when I try to access the rockbox directory in order to ROLO then flash to ROM and/or RAM, I get the -80 ATA error.

I guess that unless I want to plug in my old HDD into the player in order to update it, I'm going to be stuck on 3.9.1. Unless of course it's possible to get a newer version of 7pre4 bootloader that won't brick the player. (I asked about it a while ago and everyone seemed certain that a newer version couldn't or wouldn't be made, even though apparently someone fixed the -80 ata panic years ago.)

[anselhelm]

Update:

Confirmed that this was indeed the issue. I took the player apart, put in the old HDD, updated Rockbox, RoLo'd it then updated the RAM and ROM. Thereafter I was able to put the CF card back in, update Rockbox on that and load successfully from RAM (as ROM doesn't seem to want to load successfully each time, but that's no issue) and songs play properly.

Now if only someone could fix the 7pre4 bootloader and update it as per a fix put in way back in 2008:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CFModGuide#Current_bootloader_install_procedure_for_iRiver_H120
http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/9642

If that were done, I'd be able to boot from disk for future versions and update easier