Ipod Video + Aliexpress 128GB SSD constant crashing

[FireKeeper]

Hey everyone

I just finished putting together my refurbished ipod with a 128GB SSD I picked up from aliexpress (sounds great already, I know). Hardware wise its all good with the original FW, all buttons, functions working, putting and playing music on it included.
My troubles started with trying the stable Firmware and getting "no partition found, insert usb cable and fix it" message. With some minutes of googling I found a "solution" of using the dev build instead of stable and with that I managed to start up rockbox, but the problem is I get constant crashes on basically any operation I try to make, change a setting, etc. format is like this:

*panic*
dc_writeback_callback () - Could not write sector 224911 (error -43)
pc: 00074e94
sp: 4000aca0
A: 00082c48
bt end

Now I know it might be very difficult to troubleshoot an issue like this and I know chances of fixing it are slim, but would very much appreciate any help. I can try to provide more info if needed.
The SSD I picked up is something like this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005001344548619.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.3.7faf4c80DW13rU&algo_pvid=9e5304a8-b180-4f54-8948-8f958b14784c&algo_exp_id=9e5304a8-b180-4f54-8948-8f958b14784c-1&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2212000015763568910%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21HUF%2129508.04%2120653.99%21%21%21%21%21%402102111816694961472854879d078e%2112000015763568910%21sea&curPageLogUid=Pq1XcyXV918B

(original no longer available, possibly scammed?)

[speachy]

Use a recent nightly build, and if it still goes boom then the bug report will have a chance of being meaningful.

[speachy]

ah, I see you did use a dev build; please provide the exact build id so we can be sure we're looking at the right thing.

I think you're right that debugging this is going to be difficult at best -- though tbh a msata SSD is vast overkill for this sort of application -- it's pretty power hungry vs something like a sd card mod, which does seem to be reasonably reliable these days.

One thing you need to do though is boot the ipod into disk mode and run a fsck/chkdsk on the drive to make sure it's not too badly mangled.

Another thing that will help is to dump the ATA info and send that over -- IIRC it's accessible through the system/debug menu.  Hopefully it just passes through the mSATA SSD's info.

[FireKeeper]

Sorry for the late reply, I needed to get some tools to be able to access the SSD on its own outside of the pod.

I do wonder what could be problematic part, the IC on the adapter board, the controller on the SSD, or just how they formatted it? (so purely software problem)

I'm wondering about alternatives and happened to find an M.2 sata to micro SD converter (Haven't bought yet). Assuming the problem could be with the SSD itself, do you think I would have better luck with that combination? I know its also kind of dodgy solution but the thing is, the official iflash boards are rather expensive where I live.

Other solution I'm considering is the ZIF to CF adapter, and CF to micro SD into that, altho thats similarly dodgy with running 2 adapters.

[Carlosfz30]

Hi! I have solved the exact same problem that you have. After some heavy googling I've found this -> https://www.head-fi.org/threads/rockbox-for-ipod-video-5th-5-5th-msata-ssd-mod.707618/page-15#post-15671806

Basically it's a patched version of Rockbox with msata support, so you'll have to manually install it. Works like a charm.

(I hope I didn't break any rule posting a link to other site)

[speachy]

It would be nice if the person who uploaded that binary had actually posted the source patch too, because there have been a _lot_ of changes since the 3.14 release that binary was based on.

[Frankenpod]

Seems as if that was itself an update (to 3.14) of the ancient "beyondwind" patch.  Which itself I'm sure I've seen mentioned many times on this forum, the gist of which (in my inexpert non-dev understanding) was that it was a 'kludge' that made things work by making timings less exact, but which was considered too much of a kludge to be accepted as a patch on here.  That's just the impression I have from comments made on here in the past.

[FireKeeper]

I have tried with the latest dev build where I no longer had any crashes I did have problems copying files to the ipod. I might give this patched version a go, wonder if it's possible to add skins tho.

[saratoga]

It's probably just this old patch: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/5f3bcab69a01fdfa9f47bac73b74cf10/archive/ea12373570d0cb0e78286c64112927162b77c2e6.zip