no power, no response, no idea

[brickmaker]

Hi everyone,

I\'m fairly new to the world of destroying SHARP products but I think I may have found my calling.

So here\'s my story:
(please imagine a laugh track while I recount my tale of woe)

I\'m hanging out on the bus and playing with my zaurus sl-5500. Doing strange things like trying to get mplayer to work while opie is running.... hmmmm, frame buffer happiness. When I kill mplayer only parts of the screen are refreshed, but the \"system tray-like\" thingy is still black. Functional but blacked out.

So I decide this isn\'t good and decide to reboot.

Now I get the Openzaurus logo and a login prompt. Fine I\'ll just login and see whats wrong.
I type root.
It tells me it can\'t find /bin/sh.

I take this as a bad sign.

Soft reset. No Change.
Hard reset. No Change.

Hmmm. Well I don\'t have the ac adapter to plug into the bottom of this thing. But I\'ll just try to flash it again......

All the lights are out. It doesn\'t respond to anything.
Battery out five minutes didn\'t work.
Battery out overnight didn\'t work.

I\'m just wondering where I go from here.

Does anybody have an idea of what might have gone wrong? Why would the zaurus suddenly be unable to mount a root filesystem? What happens when the flash sequence occurs? Does anyone possess the inner dark secrets of the workings of this thing?

Are there any Zaurus hardware hackers out there?


 :cry:

[Anonymous]

Remove the battery. Try a hard reset when plugged in to ac adapter power, without the battery. Then replace the battery and turn on the device.

[lardman]

If that doesn\'t work, and assuming you tried to flash an initrd.bin & zImage set rather than an ospack you should still be able to flash. Get an AC adaptor though.

[brickmaker]

Unfortunately, the Zaurus doesn\'t respond to either of these suggestions.

I do have an ac adaptor, and my compact flash does contain an initrd.bin and zImage. I\'m getting no signs of life at all, no led, no sign that it is charging or any kind of current is passing through it.

Is it possible that I could have completely fried this thing?

[oreo]

Not fried where damage to the device occurred. Probably the software/firmware hanged up.

If you put in the battery and connect the ac adapter, is the Zaurus warm after several hours? If yes, there is life.

Since you tried to re-flash the OS but it does not turn on, it is not getting power to the circuits. That happened to my Z. I fixed it with a hard reset while the battery was removed. Can you try that again?

[brickmaker]

Yay!!!!!!

I think you were right about juice not getting power to the circuits. I was unhopeful because I had already tried a hard reset with the battery removed and the ac adaptor in, with no luck.

Maybe I\'m crazy but this is what I noticed. The zaurus didn\'t respond until I unplugged and replugged the ac adaptor from the wall socket! Suddenly the two led lights lit up: the first sign of life from my zaurus in two days and I thought: there is hope!

After a long wait to see if any of the lights would dissappear, I progressed towards eventually flashing it and now everything is happy again. My zaurus has many tales of the afterlife and light at the end of tunnels. It met a process in shiny clothes that told it \"it\'s not your time yet....brickmaker needs you.\"

I have no explanation for all of this but I don\'t think I\'m going to try and duplicate all of this.
I\'ll just let it rest for now.

Thanks for all your help!

[RichS]

You\'re situation, although sad in it\'s own right, may not be all that odd. The ac \"power adapter\" for the Z is a switching power supply. Though these are generally reliable and very effective for this type of application, they can have a problem. In the simplest of terms, you could think of this power supply as a vibrator (no jokes!). With a marginal supply, it may not \'vibrate\' and will then supply no power whatsover. Very often, unplugging them (the only way to turn off this particular supply) and plugging them back in gives the supply a \'kick\' and it will work again. I have a laptop here with a similar problem.

I would suggest you plan on buying a new power adapter if it happens again. Once they start not working, it\'s usually a rapid decline into not working at all...

[oreo]

Glad to read the good news.
I will remember your solution if it happens to my Z!

Another possibility could be a low mains voltage. If the power company has a brownout, or you have too many appliances running on the line, the voltage drops to the point where the ac power supply does not work.
I don\'t know what the limits are, just a idea.