I love my iRiver but I am not a huge fan of moving parts so I wanted to see if I could replace the hard drive with flash drive. I purchased a CF to 50 pin IDE adapter on ebay a while back to try and see if it was possible.
The adapter has a very large jumper on the front that is taller than everything else. I am pretty sure I am going to have to trim that if this works
Side by side next to the broken drive i pulled out of my iRiver. You can see the jumper in this picture on the front right edge.
More of the adapter/jumper from the side
Here is another shot from the front with the CF card inserted
Here is another side by side shot from the side. You can really see how big that jumper is here.
Another shot from the side
Here I laid the adapter on top of the broken drive.
I cracked open the iRiver put the adapter and cf card on and turned the unit on.
The drive came up as a usb device like it should! so I started copying the rockbox files over
This took a long time, but I'm using a crappy CF card for now as a proof of concept.
Now for the moment of truth will it boot?
No
It froze at the bootloader screen and now the thing won't even turn on with the old hard drive
I'm not sure what happened but I'll see if I can break it from it's slumber but I'm not very happy right now...
Edit - Ok a reset of the device brought it back with the old Hard Drive still trying to get it to boot the flash drive
Edit2 - I tried a different CF card and it worked! now I need to start trimming some jumpers to get this thing to fit inside
Edit3 - So I just bent the jumpers down so it'll fit in the case and I was able to put it back together
As you can see my 4gb flash card shows up and the system seems to work. I'm going to give her a field run this weekend I'll let you know how it goes.