Both rockbox and orig firmwar failure. Hardware problems maybe?

[MustNotSleep]

I'm sorry to have to post such vague description of the problem I'm having. I'll do my best to make it entertaining instead.

My buddy has an h10, we'll call it Jack, which is probably about 1.5 - 2 years old now. During those two years Jack proved (for the most part) to be a reliable device of iRiver standards. But recently, and this is second hand - Jack was "either transferring music or updating firmware or something..." (my buddy can't remember which for sure, but as he says, "dude, to really get into the music you have to sacrifice a couple brain cells.") ...and suddenly the player just froze, stuck at a screen with the loading clock. After a hard reset the same thing, system initializing screen straight to the clock blue screen of death. Multiple drive formatting attempts and countless firmware upgrades later the same story. True insomnia.

So I decide I want to help. My h320 has rockbox and its sweet. Otf playlists, complete customization, doom, gap-less playback, improved battery life, etc. Maybe rockbox can help. Besides, only after an iriver has lost everything is it free to do anything. The call is made.

Welcome Tyler. The call is made. Rockbox claims another soul. A space monkey ready for space.

The player now boots up and loads rockbox (with amazing speed - probably a quarter the time it takes my h320) and will play music fine. But in apparent involuntary fits times it won't play files. You can switch songs, navigate the browser, and add to the playlist but the song will never play. Even though the player appears to be playing the elapsed time stays at zero and no sound is made. Maybe ten minutes later, with or without a reset or power cycle, it will randomly start to play songs again.

But there is more. Songs will completely disappear from the file browser, as if deleted, only to reappear and be perfectly playable a few minutes later.

Could this be hardware failure? Since both rockbox is sporadic and the original firmware fails on loading I'm inclined to think it might be the hard drive. Has anybody else seen these symptoms? Does my diagnosis seem reasonable?

[Jonno12345]

You can switch songs, navigate the browser, and add to the playlist but the song will never play. Even though the player appears to be playing the elapsed time stays at zero and no sound is made.

My player was doing that after I tried the new KoCOP patch with the latest SVN... Not sure if it was a one off, I didn't try restarting but being me, I immediately blamed the KoCOP and replaced Rockbox with a clean build, and it worked fine.