Has anyone been able to blame rockbox for bricking their player

[munkifisht]

Long time since I've been, but has any1 been able to blame rockbox for a bricked player yet? Just wondering how reliable it is

[jeff]

Originally Posted by munkifisht

Long time since I've been, but has any1 been able to blame rockbox for a bricked player yet? Just wondering how reliable it is

To my knowledge no one has bricked a player from loading Rockbox. As long as you follow the instructions you should be fine. The beauty of the Rockbox bootloader is that after you have it installed you can go immediately into a USB connection if you wish without having to boot into the firmware of the player. This can REALLY help if you get a corrupt database or have a bad flash.

[rubber-glove]

Originally Posted by MisticJeff

To my knowledge no one has bricked a player from loading Rockbox. As long as you follow the instructions you should be fine. The beauty of the Rockbox bootloader is that after you have it installed you can go immediately into a USB connection if you wish without having to boot into the firmware of the player. This can REALLY help if you get a corrupt database or have a bad flash.

a slight correction: i don't think this would help with a bad flash. but rockbox and iriver can fail in booting up (as i understand it, rockbox AND iriver both load firmware off the hard drive, or at least access the hard drive) if the filesystem is corrupted.


the bootloader is part of what you flash. a bad flash would be...well... bad.

[TCK]

The old Rockbox firmware for Archos had some instances of bricked players. I'm not sure on how many, but there were some.

So far, as far as I know, there have been no bricked iRiver players due to Rockbox in any way. However, there have been a few near misses in the past. It's "safe", but I wouldn't guarantee on it being the case.

[stevenz]

The iRiver firmware is still loaded from chip, the rockbox firmware is loaded from disk, only the bootloader is integrated into the iRiver firmware.

I hope the original poster didn't intend "blame" to mean it's the Rockbox dev's fault if you stuff your own player despite the warnings!?

If the bootloader/USB client part of the firmware flashed ok but the flash failed afterwards, then all that'd mean is the iRiver firmware is broken but Rockbox should still be loadable. This isn't a lot of use unless you can reflash the firmware from that point though. (Would require flashing functionality in Rockbox itself, which I don't believe is implemented at this stage).

[robodude666]

wait... if rockbox does fail to load, cant you quickly press rec and go into the iriver firmware? then connect to usb and remove rockbox...

[Rob1n]

There's a couple of stages in the boot cycle and it depends where things stop as to whether it's recoverable or not.

The first stage is the bootloader - this is part of the firmware and handles whether to load the rockbox or iriver OS. If this fails you're stuffed - the only solution is to reflash the firmware using an external connection (not a trivial task and requiring special equipment).

The next stage is either the iriver or rockbox OS. The iriver OS is also in the firmware - if this fails then you need to reflash the firmware. Unfortunately this is not currently possible through the rockbox OS so again you're stuffed (though this'll probably come along at a later date so it's not terminal).

The rockbox OS is loaded from disk, so if this fails you can always recopy the files over the USB connection (which can be made either in the bootloader or in the iriver OS), check the disk for errors or whatever. This means there's very little risk in this part of the system.

The bootloader is kept as simple as possible and (I'm sure) undergoes a lot of testing and debugging before it's made available since it's such a critical part of the system.

[zezayer]

The ability to reflash the fw with the bootloader aswel as connect with USB would be an amazing safety feature.

[jamesshuang]

Reflashing a dead firmware requires special equipment that only iriver and Linus has, the "GDM wiggler" iirc. The current rockbox bootloader is actually already a huge improvement. Before, if your hard drive got corrupted, your player would be toast, because the iriver firmware wants a readable partition structure before it starts up. Now, with the bootloader USB mode, the bootloader doesn't care that there's even a hard drive present, it just dumps the USB into the IDE like an external hard drive. That way, you can reformat/repartition as needed.

For either the iriver or the rockbox-patched firmwares, if the flash fails, you're screwed. The ability to reflash the firmware with the bootloader is circular logic. A corrupted or failed flash would leave you without a bootloader, so it is impossible to flash it with the non-existent bootloader.

[MartinP]

Originally Posted by jamesshuang

For either the iriver or the rockbox-patched firmwares, if the flash fails, you're screwed. The ability to reflash the firmware with the bootloader is circular logic. A corrupted or failed flash would leave you without a bootloader, so it is impossible to flash it with the non-existent bootloader.

Hmm, I'm not so sure about that.

If the bootloader is in the very first part of the Flash ROM, then that might have been written successfully before the flash fails.

The iRiver firmware might fail to load (because the whole thing is needed in order to load), but the RockBox USB support might allow some "emergency flash" program to be installed on the disc, which could then be executed the next time the machine boots up in Rockbox mode (ie instead of the Rockbox firmware).

Obviously, Rockbox doesn't currently support flashing, but this sort of thing seems to be a feasible thing to implement in the future.

cheers, Martin