Installation / Removal > Iriver - Installation/Removal/Flashing
iHP 120 on Rockbox 4.0 / how to permanently get flash and ROLO right
JoeMS2025:
Hi all,
just got word from Hackaday that Rockbox 4.0 is out! A good reason to fire up the good old iRiver iHP-120 and see if I can get it back working with the latest software.
So I did and mostly it works, but I'm running into the same issue over and over again, same as in all these years before. It seems I can't get the latest firmware to go somewhere permanent. The installation with Rockbox-Utility worked fine, eventually giving me the instructions to restart the original firmware to flash the latest firmware. Unfortunately, the original firmware is no longer present, and the "original" firmware can only be one of the Rockbox firmwares already present on the device. While it is possible to use the latest rockbox.iriver file from the .rockbox root directory on the device to start Rockbox 4.0, I cannot get it flashed to the EEPROM. There just doesn't seem to be a way.
The older releases gave me a lot of headache, such as not letting me record anything because it claims it is out of disk space when more than half of the 64GB are free. Or giving warnings like "dir buffer full". I was hoping to get these resolved with later versions.
The picture attached shows the boot menu giving me three options:
* Boot from disk -> fails because an SD card is there in place of the original HDD, and I no longer have the HDD. Once in this mode, the device can only be recovered with the reset button as it is not possible to operate or even switch it off
* Boot RAM image -> starts Rockbox r18607 from 2023-09-08
* Boot ROM image -> starts Rockbox r19757 from 2013-01-09
It seems odd that the 2013 release number is greater than the one from the 2023 release but meh, that does not need to be an actuial issue. And I can't remember what I did in 2023 to successfully flash the image of that time into ROM.
In any of the RAM or ROM modes, I can go to Files -> .rockbox -> rockbox.iriver (and push the NAVI button on this file) to launch ROLO / Rockbox 4.0. However, I would like to go to Rockbox 4.0 immediately at powerup, so the best solution would be to skip the boot menu entirely and run 4.0 from flash.
I have spent hours trying to find a solution but haven't gotten any wiser. So it's time now to ask for assistance here.
Thank you so much!
Happy Easter!
Cheers,
Joe
speachy:
--- Quote from: JoeMS2025 on April 20, 2025, 12:05:16 PM ---While it is possible to use the latest rockbox.iriver file from the .rockbox root directory on the device to start Rockbox 4.0, I cannot get it flashed to the EEPROM. There just doesn't seem to be a way.
--- End quote ---
There's the 'iriver_flash' plugin that's supposed to be for that purpose.
....Flash at your own risk, of course.
JoeMS2025:
@speachy: thanks, this looks like what I need. However, I can't get it to work. This is what I do:
* select ROM image in the bootloader preface screen
* select rockbox.iriver (version 4.0) from the files to have ROLO load the latest image
* after restarting, select the same file again and hold the NAVI button longer to show the context menu, then select 'open with...' and select iriver_flash
This is what I get (same as in the picture, sorry about the cracked screen, I took yesterday's photos from the 'naked' device and then re-assembled it):
--- Code: ---Flash: V=00bf, P=2782
SST39VF160
Size: 2048 KB
Aborting: incompatible bootloader
--- End code ---
The same is happening when I select rombox.iriver, and there are no other .iriver files around, and nothing else that looks like it might contain an actual bootloader.
Sorry about the dumb questions but until now I was rather on the user side, not the developer side...
speachy:
--- Quote from: JoeMS2025 on April 21, 2025, 04:08:58 AM ---
* select rockbox.iriver (version 4.0) from the files to have ROLO load the latest image
* after restarting, select the same file again and hold the NAVI button longer to show the context menu, then select 'open with...' and select iriver_flash
--- End quote ---
...You need to flash the file 'rombox.iriver'
--- Quote from: JoeMS2025 on April 21, 2025, 04:08:58 AM ---Aborting: incompatible bootloader
--- End quote ---
The actual bootloader is installed separately, downloadable from https://download.rockbox.org/bootloader. Follow the instructions in the manual to install it, or use the rockbox utility. It was last updated a few years ago (after 3.15).
JoeMS2025:
Sorry, but this is becoming even more obscure. I downloaded the bootloader file from here: https://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/iriver/8.0/bootloader-h120.iriver
Then put it in the root directory of the iRiver's drive which didn't work. Found out by looking up in the source code of iriver_flash that the file needs to be renamed to bootloader.iriver in order to be usable by iriver-flash. Eventually, that way, I finally got the flashing process to succeed but there is still no difference in the boot menu. I can still select RAM or ROM and am still getting the outdated versions as shown in my initial post, no sign of version 4.0.
Then looked closer at the manual about writing a bootloader and tried fwpatcher.exe (downloaded from https://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/iriver) to manually create a pached ihp_120.hex, and put that in the root folder. Still no change.
The manual at https://download.rockbox.org/daily/manual/rockbox-iriverh100/rockbox-buildch2.html#x4-60002 claims that the device needs to be restarted with the NAVI key being pushed down to get to a point where the new .hex file is consumed and flashed. As I'm getting a boot menu first that offers me two versions (both outdated), I think the process needs to be a little different here. But even if I select RAM or ROM and then keep the NAVI key down, it only leads to the Files context menu. Same as when the system started regularly, the Files item is the one initially selected, and doing a long NAVI push on it brings up the context menu. Unlike the manual says, there is no Firmware upgrade option anywhere. I think that is because the versions that I can start from the boot menu are vastly outdated, but they are the only ones I can initially start.
I also tried to use ROLO to load Rockbox 4.0 from one of the older systems (Files -> navigate to rockbox.iriver and pushing NAVI to load) and then keeping NAVI pushed down while v4.0 starts up, only to see the same effect and no Firmware update menu anywhere.
I'm now wondering if what I'm trying to achieve here (basically followig the manual) isn't the same as selecting the bootloader.iriver file and opening it with iriver_flash, like I did in the first place? Which told me it succeeded, however with no effect?
Eventually I also tried to use Rockbox Utility again to do a complete re-install, including the bootloader, and still no luck. Even wiped the entire .rockbox root directory and any .bin/.hex files from the drive first. Despite the process completing everything, the boot behavior remains unchanged.
I would even go back to the iRiver original firmware if I could to do a clean restart of everything but that's not possible without the original HDD which I have lost. The Rockbox Utility Uninstall function just doesn't appear to do anything.
My impression is that my iHP-120 is different from the standard in places that the regular toolchain cannot touch. No idea how that happened, and how to improve it. Eventually I know the way to go to v4.0 on each startup manually. It's a nuisance but possible to do. Maybe we better let it settle at that. Thanks for your help! :D
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version