From: pondlife <pondlife_at_ntlworld.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:58:07 -0000

Hi all,

A SUMMARY:

The current released H300 bootloader (v5) is now over 3 years old, and has
several issues that have been resolved in SVN* since::
- Unable to start the device using the standard (non-LCD) remote.
- USB fails to work at all (on some devices)
- Lacks RTC alarm support (* also needs FS#7814)
- Loud audio thump at startup
- Hard disk click entering USB (on some devices)
More details at http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IriverBoot

Personally, I'm successfully running a bootloader I built, version
r19309M-081203 (where M is FS#7814). This works fine with both the H340
stock drive (whatever that was) and my current MK8007GAH. FWIW, prior to
that I successfully ran r14938M (but am not 100% sure what the M was in this
case!).

However, petur found that on his H300 (or one of his H300s?) that he was
unable to boot reliably with an SVN bootloader, due to a crash in the ATA or
threading initialisation code.

I believe the closest we got to resolving it was in April 2008 - see the dev
list thread "building bootloader from source (h300)" available at
http://www.mail-archive.com/rockbox-dev_at_cool.haxx.se/msg03786.html In
particular, petur's post:

> It looked like a timing issue, but it turned out that adding debug
> prints merely changed the timing in a subtle way for the bug to
> happen more or less. Adding sleeps does not do this, in fact I
> can add sleeps at certain points and get a nice crash.
>
> When it crashes, it is always in threading code, giving me I03
> or I04 (AddrErr and IllInstr) in thread.o or its data area.

Current status if I understand correctly:
- Only LinusN has the hardware to recover a bricked H300
- Only petur had booting problems
- LinusN thinks he knows which SVN revision introduced the problem (but I
can't find a number!)

Please post here if I've made a mistake in my summary, or if you've tried a
post-V5 bootloader, or if you know what the problem is and we might be able
to resolve it with a bit of sharing and time.

THE WAY FORWARD:

I intend to build a new bootloader from current SVN (with no RTC patch),
then try it here. If that boots, I'd like to put it up on the forum (?)
with a suitable brick-warning for brave souls to try. My hope is that it
either:
(a) works for everyone (except maybe petur, so we can identify that as a
one-off) or
(b) fails on the device of a dev with spare time (or someone who could lend
the device to a dev).

I fear there are relatively few H300 owners around now, although it remains
my player of choice, so this might be a last chance to bring the bootloader
up to speed.

Does this sound like a reasonable idea, or a waste of time? Any other
suggestions?

pondlife
Received on 2009-11-19