OK - now I _really_ need some ideas. SL-C3100, happily runing Sharp. I´ve written before about problems with trying to flash pdaXii13. I´d got it back to Sharp by the rather long-winded process with re-formatting the HD and getting the images from Trisoft. Thought I´d have a go with pdaXrom r198, as I had the suspend problem with ii13. Followed the instructions for U-Boot. Dead. Won´t respond to DM or DB hard resets. Any ideas? I´ve tried leaving the battery out ages, no different. Help please!!

Well, I´ve kept trying, and finally it´s responded to OK on hard reset, despite not responding to DB or DM. Very odd - I thought they were the lowest-level resets of all. But even then it didn behave a bit like the instructions said - no command prompt, just did its own thing, but seems to be working. Moral is - keep trying!! But if I want to change back to Cacko, I´ll have to get into command-line mode. How do I do that if it doesn´t respond to DB hard reset?

Use Fn+D+B instead of D+B. The D+B menu can be corrupted by Uboot (or something else), but the Fn+D+B is in ROM and cannot be corrupted easily. I have not heard of anyone being locked out of the Fn+D+B menu.

UBoot overwrites the sharp bootloader which is where the DM / DB boot from

Late

Thanks, InSearchOf and T3_Slider. I wasn´t aware of that one ... but regret it still doesn´t work. Still get U-boot. I´m keen to get the service menu and do a NAND restore and start again, but I can´t find a way of doing it. ... later ... I´ve now tried Fn D M and it does work! Thanks v. much.

Have you tryed this:
remove battery
remove external power
press (and keep holding down) Fn + D + M
insert the external power (while still holding down Fn+D+M)

Yes thanks - it does work now. God knows what people with fingers missing do!

For future reference:

http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=24199

Ha ha, yes -- you do need some dexterity! I had to practically balance my Z on my three fingers to get that to work. Although alphabetically D+M=Diagnostic Menu may have been easy to remember they sure made it difficult to perform.

Thanks - that covers Fn D M pretty thoroughly!

Just one problem for future reference - I could get recovery with Fn D M - but if I'd buggered up the formatting of the HD and needed to get into a command prompt to fdisk, I couldn't do it, because it definitely didn't respond to Fn D B. I know from previous unhappy hours that a NAND restore doesn't work if the HD is incorrectly formatted or even if it doesn't have those irrelevant Sharp bookmark files - so what would I do then? Can't use Fn D M because NAND resstore wouldn't work, and can't get into Fn D B. Or would _trying_ a NAND restore at least un-bugger the SharpROM to the extent of allowing Fn D B or even D B?
Thanks for everything!

There's a thread on hard drive recovery here: http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showt...hl=hd+partition