FWIMG01.DAT

[crunkasaurus]

Please forgive me if this is a stupid question or something, I'm not particularly good with computers but I'm really interested in trying this firmware out.

I've been reading the guide to installing Rockbox onto the Gigabeat F (I personally have an F40 if that makes any difference) and I'm up to the point of extracting the .rockbox folder and the rockbox.gigabeat file to the Gigabeat's drive (although I deleted the rockbox.gigabeat file as per the uninstall instructions at the end of the guide because I hit the roadblock, so to speak, that I'll discuss ahead and I wanted to make sure the Toshiba firmware would load up normally until i got the RB firmware installed.)

Anyway, the guide describes a folder called FWIMG which is hidden on the gigabeat's drive. It also indicates that this folder contains a file called FWIMG01.DAT. However, when I access this folder manually through windows explorer (E:\GBSYSTEM\FWIMG) the folder does not contain the FWIMG01.DAT file. It contains no visible files at all, in fact. So my question is, is the file itself hidden somehow, and if so how do I make it visible / available to be edited? Secondly, if I for some strange reason do not have the file on my gigabeat drive (which seems unlikely considering that the file is probably necessary for the F40 to work) how would I go about going around this problem?

Thanks for reading and for any help you might be able to provide. Sorry again if I've made some amateurish mistake and wasted your time  

[Llorean]

Try making sure that your computer is set to display both Hidden and System files.

In Explorer: Tools-> Folder Options, choose the View tab, and make sure the appropriate options are set.

[crunkasaurus]

Bingo, that was it. Thanks. Another small question: the guide says that I need to write my own bootloader, but then immediately after it says that there is a link to a directory where I can download a FWIMG01 file. Is this the bootloader I need, or do I still need to create my own?

Thanks again for your help, Llorean.

[Llorean]

The one linked will work.

[crunkasaurus]

The one linked will work.

Hm, I tried it and the regular Toshiba firmware loaded. I did everything correctly according to the guide as far as I can tell and used the latest daily build. Any idea what I may have done wrong?

[Llorean]

Many people skip over the "Initial Startup" steps at the end of the guide. They must be done that way for it to work.

[crunkasaurus]

Ah, didn't see to turn the battery off and on. Everything's working now, just need to try to get the font a little bigger and i'll be all set

Thanks again

[crunkasaurus]

Okay now I'm starting to freak out

I tried to uninstall rockbox because it wasn't playing music files at all and I wanted to try again so I deleted the rockbox.gigabeat file and turned the battery off and on and now neither the rockbox firmware or toshiba firmware will load and Windows can't seem to recognize the device as a USB hard drive

What do I do I really hope I didn't just brick my mp3 player

[crunkasaurus]

Somehow managed to make windows recognize the device, but I feel like I'm messing up all kinds of things here in my confusion... going to try and reinstall the rockbox firmware and go from there

Okay got the rockbox firmware up and running again by some odd chance. Still won't play any music files and I can't even view individual tracks in the menu, just albums / artists. This thread is really panicked and ridiculous, sorry.

edit: In regards to uninstallation, deleting the rockbox.gigabeat file and rebooting the device does not, as the instructions say it should, cause the original Toshiba firmware to load. Instead I get a rockbox error screen displaying rockbox error: -1. How can I return to the original firmware?

Trying to load the original firmware under rockbox gives me several lines of text followed by the line "Woops, should not return from firmware!" What on earth did I do to this poor thing?

[Llorean]

The dual boot feature isn't working right, which is why you can't load the original firmware under Rockbox (and why deleting rockbox.gigabeat doesn't work yet).

Instead, rename the FWIMG01.DAT to something else, and rename the .ORIG file that you backed up to its original name, then follow the final steps of the install again.

[crunkasaurus]

The dual boot feature isn't working right, which is why you can't load the original firmware under Rockbox (and why deleting rockbox.gigabeat doesn't work yet).

Instead, rename the FWIMG01.DAT to something else, and rename the .ORIG file that you backed up to its original name, then follow the final steps of the install again.

It's giving me an error message "NO SYSTEM FOUND ON HDD"

I didn't do anything other than change the FWIMG.DAT.ORIG back to .DAT and rename the other FWIMG to "aaaaaa.DAT"

Did I accidentally delete a necessary file or something? I don't remember deleting anything.

[Llorean]

It probably should not have been named aaaaa.dat, I'm not sure, though.

If you can, just move it out of the folder entirely, and someplace else on the device.

[crunkasaurus]

Oh I found the problem, I had the original dat file renamed back to "FWIMG.DAT" in the explorer which effectively made the filename "FWIMG.DAT.DAT" which was messing things up. Seems the toshiba firmware is booting just fine now.

I like the firmware, I'll have to reinstall it tomorrow and try to make it work a little better, I must have tripped up somewhere along the way.

You've been really helpful Llorean, thanks for everything.

[Llorean]

There's a nice PDF manual that will probably be of a lot of help to getting the software running properly. I'm betting that the problem wasn't the install, but just that you're unfamiliar with it.

For one thing, music needs to be actual .mp3 files, just copied over like you copy files to another disk, not the .SAT files it syncs to it.

[SteveGotthardt]

crunkasaurus, if you cant see individual files, there is a setting that you can make in general settings -> File view -> Show files: choose 'Supported' to start with.

Steve