Phew, Almost Bricked A Sl-5000d

Another one of those don't-know-if-anyone-cares-but-didn't-want-to-loose-it posts.

I just managed to rescue a SL-5000D from what is probably a near-brick state.

History:
After trying for several days to get a new kernel on it (which I never did), I got it stuck in diagnostic mode. Ok, some fiddling there yielded that the checksum on the ROM wasn't OK anymore, and how to get out to reboot normally. Turns out I clearly stompped something while there as it wouldn't boot, just sat there. Back to diag mode and more fiddling resulted in it not being able to even exit diag mode anymore. Wrong direction.

The way out:
I finally figured out a lot of things. Like that I couldn't flash the ROM earlier because I was trying to flash a 5500 OSpack to it and it won't take that. Hurrah for good engineering. I also figured out how to get good working rom image for it (it is using the hybrid ROM (based on cacko, I think)), and it would flash, but still not boot. The last piece of the puzzle was that I needed not only the initrd.img and zImage, but also the bootflag.txt file (which I found in the rootfs_20011119 image). I put the the three on a CF card, used the diag menu to update from CF, then rebooted and used the diag menu to tell itself to not start. Lo and behold, the kernel booted.

It was that missing bootflag.txt file that did the trick.

Frustrations:
Everywhere all over this site, and elsewhere on the net, are links to Sharp's site for SL-5000D ROM images, that rootfs kit, etc. Sharp appears to have removed all that stuff from their site, as well as all mention of a product called a SL-5000D. It might be a good idea if we quite referring people to the Sharp site for anything 5000D-ish.

just thought this might help someone else,
patbob

Got A 128mb Cf To Work For Flashing Sl-5000d

I don't know who, if anyone, might be interested in this, so I figured I'd post it here.

I managed to get a 128MB CF card to work for flashing the ROM. It could mount it when the kernel was booted but not flash from it. Previously, all attempts would result in it the green mail and amber charge light coming on for a second, then going off. I can only assume the CF driver in the updater program can't handle the same cards that the one compiled into the kernel can.

My solution was to make a 31M partition on the front of the card and use that.

Details (I don't know if all the steps were important):
1) Wipe the entire device to zeros via a dd
2) use fdisk to create new DOS partition table.
3) add a primary partition to it that starts at the first "cylinder" and is 31MB in size.
4) change the partition type to 4 (fdisk lists that one as "FAT16 <32M").
5) use mkdosfs to create a fat16 filesystem on it (use the -F16 option).

Then, when I used it for flashing, I put only the files I was flashing on it. Worked like a champ. To change files, I was paranoid and trying to rescue a confused zaurus, so I redid the whole dd/partition/format process with each set of files.

I did the flashing through the diagnostic menu on the Z because that was all that would work on it, but I suspect if it works there, it works for hte normal C+D+reset method.

hope this helps someone.
patbob