Bringing my iLazarus back from the dead!
Those of you who follow me on Facebook/Twitter will know of my
embarrasing predicament earlier in the week, when I tried to upgrade the
Firmware on my ancient (3 year old) iRiver H10 MP3 player. What started
of as an attempt to bring my device up to date, turned into a 6 hour
long nightmare as the upgrade completely 'bricked' my player.
Using iRiver's own firmware upgrade utility resulted in my device
rebooting and showing the 'MPT INITIALIZE' message on the main window,
and going no further. Several attempts to format the device and
reinstall the official firmware did not work.
Frustratingly, the iRiver utility, when starting up, asks me whether I
purchased the device in the US or in Europe. Umm, the correct answer is
'neither'. I assume that there is separate firmware for the Australian
or AsiaPac region, but no amount of searching on Google would give me a
link.
Choosing the US option resulted in a brick, and the European option
resulted in the firmware update utility crashing on my PC. No win.
During my frantic searching though, I came across a post for installing
an open source firmware on the H10 called RockBox. So, I went over the
www.rockbox.org and downloaded the appropriate firmware, installed it
and, behold, my iRiver came back.
Admittedly, the default RockBox interface is a bit crusty, but I found a
passable theme on the site as well, and now at least my iRiver is
working like a charm - so no need to shell our for an iPod just yet!.
NB: I did lose all my songs on the device though, but luckily I have
them all backed up on a NAS device in the office, so it took about 1.5
hours to restore 2700 songs back onto the device!
NB2: If you are trying this at home, please note that the RockBox
installer will not copy the correct bootloader onto the device. You
have to manually download and copy the H10.mi4 file onto the device in
UMS mode. Drop me a line if you need more info.
