Gigabeat and SSD

[fil_lif]

Hi,
My 9 year old Gigabeat F40's hard drive is finally starting to glitch, so I bought an as-new F20 and a 128GB SSD (same connector, same voltage) to go in it thinking it would be easy to swap in and rockbox.  Not so.

Using rockbox-utility to install, manually installing, and compiling my own build results in the same error.
When powered on after the install the gigabeat boot screen stops half way and stays that way until a battery-off reset.  When powered on with the usb plugged in, the gigabeat boot screen gets half way then goes into the rockbox usb bootloader mode, but the gigabeat does not show up as a drive (in ubuntu or windoze).  Unplug the usb and I get "ATA error: -11" and the gigabeat shuts down.

Then it's a case of opening it up, putting the SSD into a 50 pin caddy, it show's up when connected, and I reformat, again, (to one FAT32 partition) and have a think about what I'm missing.

In the past week I've read many wiki pages, forum pages, patch pages, etc, to see what else to do, so my custom builds have included changing the gigabeat.h config file to define flash storage instead of disk storage, to have multivolume (and i repartitioned into two 64GB partitions), and both of these together; LBA48 is already defined so didn't need to try that.
Somewhere along the way I read the ATA error was battery related (so I've checked the connection, and for shorts), but all the installation methods I've tried work on the 20GB HDD that came in the gigabeat.

Thanks for reading, any ideas from someone more competent would be much appreciated.
Cheers, Fil.

[burkjavier]

Almost glad I didn't see your post earlier as it may have stopped me from doing this myself - I actually upgraded my old F20 to a 128GB SSD this month (Kingspec brand, which I believe is the only vendor making these?) and it's been running fine using the standard 3.13 firmware.  Will explain exactly what I did so maybe it can be used as a guide.   I have both a Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 13.10 system, btw.   Also not sure if you're still having an issue but will assume that you are:

- F20 was open and connected it to my Ubuntu system, then powered up and let it fail as is the normal procedure.   Then I connected the Kingspec to the F20 and Ubuntu then saw the drive.   I then ran GPARTED, removed the existing partition (I think it was NTFS) and created a single FAT32 partition in its place.
- I had a backup of the original V3 Gigabeat firmware, so I copied that entire GBSYSTEM folder over.  Then I unmounted, disconnected the device and powered off / on (I think I actually turned off / on the battery as well).  Gigabeat firmware came up after a short delay so that worked.

From there it was just running the Rockbox Installer, this time on my Windows box as that's my main rig with all my music, and then disconnect / reboot again and Rockbox was up and running on the SSD and no issues so far.

EDIT:  More details on my SSD.  It's a Kingspec "KSD-CF-18.6-128MS".  This shows up on the box by the UPC, and in Rockbox I can see the same model number in System > Debug > Disk Info

[fil_lif]

Awesome, thanks roebeet, it's alive!
It never occurred to me to try and get the gigabeat working as a gigabeat before i tried to rockbox it; my original firmwares were wrong.
Fixing it using the original cd was unproductive, using the v.3 update was too, eventually found a backup of my firmwares on a dusty CDRW.
Just got to FLAC a few hundred cds now to make the most of it.

[burkjavier]

Glad to hear!   I haven't done a full-blown battery test yet but so far it seems to work at least as well as the old HDD did.