I bought a Z C3200 from eBay and found that the previous owner installed PDAX on it. Seeing I'm learning Japanese I wanted to restore the unit back to it's original software. Searching the forums here I found that I could download the original nand flash restore from the Conics website. After finding a CF card that works (the Zaurus seems to be picky about that) I now have flashed the rom and am stuck!

The Zaurus starts with the bootscreen but then gives me a message that there is a HD failure. I guess I somehow have to restore the HD as well but no idea how I can do this or where I can get the original software.

Can anyone here point me in the right direction???

Many thanks from a Zaurus newby.

I have a couple of 512MB CF cards that I always use for flashing. I believe people have had problems when trying to flash with large CF cards, which may have been the problem. The other cards may work with your Zaurus after you have a ROM working.

As far as the MicroDrive, this page may have what you need:
http://trisoft.de/en_c3200howto.htm

Yeah found that, will do that first thing tomorrow but does that bring the original software back? If I understand correctly it came with tons of cool language tools... Or is that all in the small 130mb rom?

I believe that between the HDD image and the ROM image, you should be back to an original Sharp ROM. I just acquired a C3200, but I flashed it to pdaxii13v2 and haven't had any reason to try restoring the Japanese ROM. (Mine actually came "pre-Anglicized," so I didn't have the Japanese ROM to start with, either.)

Incidentally, if you're only learning Japanese, you might want an upgraded ROM that has an English ROM (assuming English is your native tongue) but still supports Japanese. Some folks here have done that and you should be able to search the forums and find more info. It might be a little easier than being dropped into a completely Japanese UI, unless you're already fairly competent in the language.

For any modern Zaurus (i.e. SL-C series) there is only one Sharp ROM, there is no such thing as an "English Sharp ROM" or "Japanese Sharp ROM".

- You had the Sharp ROM with locale set to "en".

I thought there was more to it than just setting the locale. I've already flashed it so I can't really check now, but I thought there were a couple other tweaks done, unless I'm thinking of Cacko.

I'm now also curious about Conics' option to provide provide an "English setup and retain Japanese" for an additional fee.

If you have the Sharp ROM the difference between Japanese and English is a simple setting in locale.conf

I don't want to put down the Conics product because I know nothing about it. If you only adjust the locale, there are many things you can do to make it a bit nicer:

You can add English help files that don't come with the ROM by default and you can remove the input methods for Japanese. For example, when you are adding a postal code in an address in the QT address book automatically a special number input method pops up but it's designed for Japanese postal codes.

There are a couple of translation files that are missing I think, media player perhaps ?

Finally, the categories database has hard coded "business" and "personal" options but written in katakana. It's possible they modified the ROM with recompiled apps so those are removed.

Conics has several ROM backups available here:
http://downloads.conics.net/pda/zaurus-sl-...iginal-backups/

My problem is that even after using any of the C3200 roms from the Conics page I still get the HDD1 Error. I have followed the instructions from the TRIsoft webpage on how to restore the HD here: http://www.trisoft.de/en_c3200howto.htm but still no joy.

Is there no one who can help?

PS
I have also tried the TRISoft nand backup, same result so something must be wrong with the way the HD is done.

I found a GREAT walk trough here: http://figlabs.com/restore/ and now have a fully working Zaurus with original software in Japanese

Thought I would put the update here as the above link was not easy to find.

Just to add some info that none has confirmed until now in the forums, it's possible to do a nand restore from a SD card (on a SL-C3200 at least).