V8 of H300 bootloader not taking after firmware upgrade

[LambdaCalculus]

Hey everyone,

I've pulled out my iriver H320, which hadn't been updated in over a year, so I can get it up to speed with the new bootloader (v8) and a new build (currently d5695822a7 at the time of this writing).I used Rockbox Utility to facilitate both installing the new bootloader and the build.

While installing the build went fine, the bootloader is giving me issues. I know that bootloader installation has to be done from the OF, so I booted back into the OF and went to perform the firmware upgrade (my H320 has v5 of the bootloader and v1.29J of the OF installed, and I used a v1.29J OF file to patch for the v8 bootloader). The "UPGRADING FIRMWARE" screen appeared stayed for about a minute, then the device turned off. Easy enough, right? Nope!

When I rebooted the device, I caught sight that the reported bootloader version was still v5. And Rockbox now hard freezes when it tries to bring up the main menu, forcing me to have to press the reset pin on the H320.

(Just to note: the patched firmware file is named H300.hex, and is indeed located on the root folder of my player.)

So now my question is: has anyone else had issues trying to flash the latest bootloaders to their H300s? Is there anything I should be aware of that might help the process along? Should I perhaps try a different version of the OF? I could do with 1.29K, so long as it works.

[braewoods]

What version of Rockbox Utility? Support for the V8 bootloader has not made it into any official release of Rockbox Utility yet. It is only available currently if you build it yourself from master.

If you were using an older version of Rockbox Utility that would explain why you got the V5 bootloader. It's still the default for older releases due to the fact that Rockbox Utility is setup to use hard-coded bootloader releases for the H100, H120, and H300 targets.

Option 1 to get the V8 bootloader is to download the iriver_flash compatible image from here: https://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/iriver/8.0/bootloader-h300.iriver

You then have to use the iriver_flash plugin to load the file but you need to be able to boot rockbox first.

Option 2 is to use fwpatcher.exe to patch an original firmware file. You can download that from here: https://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/iriver/8.0/fwpatcher.exe

This only works if you are using Windows. It doesn't require a pre-release Rockbox Utility to work. But you need to be able to boot the OF for this to work.

[LambdaCalculus]

When was iriver_flash made available for the H300? I could always just revert back to an older version that'll boot, allow me to run iriver_flash and update my bootloader, and then I should be able to go back to a newer revision afterwards.

Option 2 is to use fwpatcher.exe to patch an original firmware file. You can download that from here: https://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/iriver/8.0/fwpatcher.exe

This only works if you are using Windows. It doesn't require a pre-release Rockbox Utility to work. But you need to be able to boot the OF for this to work.

I do have Wine...

[braewoods]

iriver_flash was made available for the H300 after 3.15 so you need a development release from around the time I released the updated bootloaders. But if you can't boot any version of Rockbox right now then it won't do you any good any way. I suspect flashing from the OF may be your only option.

[LambdaCalculus]

I took your advice, grabbed fwpatcher.exe (and it works perfect in Wine!), patched an OF update, applied it via the firmware upgrade in the OF, and after updating the build to the current (as of this posting, revision 3ed035769c) dev build, I managed to get back into Rockbox! Thanks a bunch!