Topic: Need iRiver h120 Repair Help!

[willyjbrown]

Not too long ago I dropped my iRiver h120 on some pavement on accident while pulled it out of my bag. When I picked it up and cut it on, it was immediately not working correctly. It still does the same thing:

1) When cut on, it says to hook up USB (I have Rockbox by the way)
2) After hooking up USB, it does nothing
3) When I reset the h120, it goes back to the original software and says there's some sort of problem, I forget exactly what it says

I'm guessing it's a hard drive problem, but I have no clue. If anybody out there has any advice on how to save it at this point, or even any volunteers to help repair it, I'd greatly appreciate it!

*I also did the same thing with my Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox .mp3 player a while ago, and it displays "Hard Disc Error" as well. If anybody has advice or can repair this one, I'd REALLY appreciate it!

[petur]

Because of the drop it could well be that the drive is gone - you won't know until it tries to access it.

From what you're reporting, it sounds to me like some soldering broke and possibly also the harddisk disconnected. There is some kind of a daugtherboard in there that hosts both HDD connector and USB, if both act up at the same time, that is where to look

[SmokinJoe]

I expect it is the hard drive.  I had an iHP120 that did the exact same thing, after dropping in on the pavement as well.  Bought a hard drive off ebay for about $40 and it works like a champ.  These 20 gb hard drives are the same as some of the iPods so they are pretty common.  The original comes with P/N MK2004GAL, but the replacement I got was MK2006GAL and it works fine.  Not sure what the difference is between "04" and "06". To get the iRiver apart you will need a T5 Torx driver... available at Sears for about $3.   

On the JB3 I got Hard Drive Error (I think) once. I formatted the hard drive, and reloaded the firmware, and it was fine.  Lost the show data on there of course.  Those take a regular Laptop hard drive, so they are plentiful.

[petur]

The original comes with P/N MK2004GAL, but the replacement I got was MK2006GAL and it works fine.  Not sure what the difference is between "04" and "06".

Just a newer generation. It does not indicate what connector is used, so you have to be carefull. There is a good overview of drives on http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/HardDriveReplacement.

[willyjbrown]

So I bought a new hard drive off of eBay, and when I hooked it up and cut on the h120, the usual "Rockbox boot loader, Version 6, Batt: 3.73V" screen cut on. However, it gets stuck here and does not sound like it's booting up or trying to move on to the main screen.

Any ideas?

[SmokinJoe]

Did you try this?  I expect you may need to partition/format/load Rockbox.

- with H120 turned off, plug USB into computer
- turn H120 on... should come up in USB mode.
- reformat the hard drive as fat32 (using the disk manager in your computer)
- copy the Rockbox O/S files to it
- properly detach the H120 from computer
- let it boot

If all goes fine except the last boot, you may need to reload the boot loader... not sure about that.

[willyjbrown]

When I did this, the iRiver went to its usual "USB mode" screen and the computer made its little noise recognizing that it had been cut on and plugged in, yet I could not pull up the drive on the computer. It sounded like it never tried to either, even after both the computer and iRiver seemed to recognize what was going on...

Any other ideas? Thanks again for the help. Hopefully I can get this thing repaired without dropping more money!

[petur]

That could be perfectly normal if the drive contains no (or an invalid) partition.

Use a tool like swissknife, or otherwise the diskmanager of windows (right-click mycomputer and select manage)

[willyjbrown]

Awesome! It now works! Just need to reinstall my Rockbox software. I tried this with the old hard drive plugged in and nothing even came up under the Disk Management screen, so I'm guessing it's fried. Thanks again for everyone's help!