Sharp Zaurus SL-C860 not switching on

[slaanesh]

Whilst messing around with ALARM for Sharp Zaurus on SL-C1000 abd SL-C3000, I tried flashing my SL-C860 (not with ALARM but pdaXrom) but after flashing, it seems to be dead.

It just won't turn on and the power light no longer comes on when I plug it in to a power supply.

I've tried booting whilst holding On and D+B and D+M but I'm not getting anything at all.

I know it's not directly related to ALARM (sorry!) but I was hoping someone could help me out with some advice?

[Varti]

Thread moved to Hardware discussion.

If the charging led won't turn on when the charger is plugged in, it could mean that the battery is broken and needs to be replaced, that the charger is broken or that the charging fuse in your Zaurus is blown. If you have any spare battery and/or charger, try swapping them and see if at least the charging led works.

Regarding the D+M menu, I have never managed to activate it with the ON key. Here are two procedures I always follow, which don't require the ON button to be pressed. I have tried them now on my SL-C860 and they both always worked:

1) with the battery: power down the Zaurus and remove all the power sources (both the AC adaptor and the battery). Keep the battery switch on the "Open" position for at least 5 seconds. Then connect the AC adaptor and put back the battery and its cover, but keep the switch to the "Open" position. Hold down the D and M keys (no need to press the ON key too) and set the battery switch back to "Close" (while keys are pressed!). Keep the keys pressed for approx. 5 seconds, the diagnostics menu should appear.

2) without the battery: try again, this time without the battery and the switch left to "Open", by holding down the D and M keys and plugging in the AC adaptor, remember to keep both keys pressed for 5 seconds.

I couldn't make the diag menu to appear with the D+B combination, at least with the procedures above.

Varti

[slaanesh]

Thanks for your reply! And moving to the correct forum.

I don't see the charging LED come on when I plug in the charger. The charger works fine for my other Zaurus (SL-C1000, SL-C3000 and SL-C5600).
I have tried other batteries - all work on my other Zaurus but nothing seems to wake up my SL-C860.

The last thing I did on my SL-860 was leave it on the charger overnight and then flash it with pdaXrom. Once it had finished flashing, I had disconnected it, took the battery out, then tried to switch it back on but it has never turned on since.

Trying the D+M menus seem fruitless as I am never getting the yellow LED coming on in the first place, so I think there is no power getting to the unit.

If the charging fuse is dead inside the Zaurus, would that stop the battery from operating the unit? Should that little yellow LED be lighting up with a battery or is that for charging only?

EDIT:
I found this old thread for the SL-C860:
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showto...=11539&st=0
Unfortunately none of the attachments or links work re: photos for locating the fuses.
Also the thread mentions using 0603 sized fuses in 630mA and 2000mA varieties. Both of these seem hard to get in low quantities.

Also found the following internal pics of SL-C3200:
http://www.penguin.cz/~utx/zaurus/teardown
Was thinking could spot the fuses near the power input to get an idea what to look for. But can't really identify them.

[Varti]

I have managed to find one of the two missing photos on archive.org, I have now edited the post and attached the image to it:

https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?s=&...ost&p=95499

The other one is unfortunately still missing, all the files which were stored on cacko.oesf.org are long gone, and I have not found any copy of the image on OESF's wiki. I have found another thread where the user louigi600 has mentioned that he has stored the files on his website, though there's no trace of its url... I might get in touch with him and ask him if he still have the missing file.
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?s=&...st&p=156642

When the Zaurus boots the maintenance menu, I have noticed that the charger led is never switched on, so I believe it's activated only via software. Hence I would anyway try to enter the menu, to verify if the problem is only caused by software (i.e. by a broken pdaxrom installation), or if the problem is with charging, with the battery powering or both. AFAIK the charger led only indicates that the charger is plugged, and it should be turned off when the Zaurus is switched on and powered only by the battery.

A blown charging fuse should not stop the battery from operating the unit, too.

Varti

[slaanesh]

This morning I tried again to turn on my SL-C860. I followed your advice and ignored the fact that no LED light switches on.
I tried using the D+M method with and without a battery but was not successful.

However, I tried another method - holding the OK button whilst switching on and this actually succeeded it power on the SL-C860 - it booted into the pdaXrom emergency prompt.
I was quite relieved to see some life as at least that means it's not a hardware related issue.

Thanks for your advice, as it prompted me to give it another go.

So I guess I should try starting the device with a pdaXrom filesystem on the SD card - perhaps that is the only issue?

[Varti]

Glad to hear you got it working, and that the issue was not hardware related. Regarding pdaXrom's not booting, maybe you skipped some step during the installation, you might want to try to install it again. There's a good installation tutorial in the wiki:

https://www.oesf.org/wiki/index.php?title=Installing_pdaXrom

BTW I have fixed the missing screenshots in the page, I have recovered them from the archive.org copy of the page.

I now vaguely remember that pdaXrom erases the D+M menu, though not the D+B one, so that might be the reason why it wasn't showing up, I might be wrong though.
EDIT: Actually, it seems that pdaXrom removes only the maintenance menu, not the D+M one:

Installing some non-Sharp ROMs, such as pdaXrom's U-Boot boot loader (which provides an alternate method to flash the Zaurus ROM), destroys the Maintenance Menu. The menu utility can be recovered with a NAND flash restore, though this would destroy the installed non-Sharp ROM.

https://www.oesf.org/wiki/index.php?title=Maintenance_Menu

Varti

[slaanesh]

I have found you can access the SL-C860 Service Menu using the following:

Code: [Select]

1). Unplug power and remove battery, leaving switch in open position.
2). Leave unpowered for about 5 seconds.
3). Hold the Fn + D + M keys all at the same time.
4). Whilst still holding the keys either:
        a). insert a charged battery.
        b). plug in the power cable.
        In either case you don't not need to change the switch position!
5). The service menu should appear almost immediately.
There are many options - including tests, flashing cards, checking the system and various bits of hardware. Nice!

I don't know if I like pdaXrom - doesn't seem to support everything - I'm not sure which is the best distro for the SL-C860.

Pity ALARM doesn't work with it. What's stopping ALARM from working on it anyway?

[Varti]

So Fn+D+M is the correct sequence to boot the alternative Service Menu, not D+B as I thought. I have been told that the D+M key combination is for a copy of the Service Menu which is erasable, while the other copy is booted from a non-flashable ROM and is used in case the former is erased.

Yes, it is indeed useful, IMHO its most useful functions are the NAND backup and retrieve, and the NAND badblocks checker, which should be run from time to time to check the NAND's health status.

Alternatives to pdaXrom are Cacko, or the last release of OpenZaurus. Other ROMs such as Angstrom or OpenBSD aren't as polished, and they are not that easy to install, but you can give them a try anyway.

I have been told that the Alarmz's kernel has been compiled with 3x00's defines, although that doesn't mean that it won't boot on other models, too (it boots on the 1000, for example). I have not yet managed to find the time to try to boot it on my 860, I hope I'll manage to do it soon.

Varti

[slaanesh]

Actually I gave pdaXrom another go, this time ignoring X.
It's fine just using the CLI. I dont need/want all the other stuff really.

I installed some packages like gcc, binutils, glibc, SDL, make, ncurses and gcc-headers.
Then I compiled up 'rogue' and it runs great of course!
I love rogue - such a great game and it's perfectly well suited for the Z.

So what are the major differences between 1000/3000 and 860? Perhaps ALARM will work?  I'd be interested to see what your results would be.
Thanks for you help!

[Varti]

Actually I gave pdaXrom another go, this time ignoring X.
It's fine just using the CLI. I dont need/want all the other stuff really.

I installed some packages like gcc, binutils, glibc, SDL, make, ncurses and gcc-headers.
Then I compiled up 'rogue' and it runs great of course!
I love rogue - such a great game and it's perfectly well suited for the Z.

Some months ago a guy on #zaurus (called fourier, he's registered here too) told me he has successfully compiled the ratpoison WM running on pdaXrom, and apparently it ran very well and was well suited for the Zaurus screen.
Never tried rogue unfortunately. I'm more of a Mame and Doom/Quake guy

So what are the major differences between 1000/3000 and 860? Perhaps ALARM will work?  I'd be interested to see what your results would be.

Not much, according to Wikipedia: "(The SL-C3000) featured a similar hardware and software specification to the earlier C860 model; the key differences were that it only had 16 MB of flash memory yet gained an internal 4 GB Hitachi microdrive, a USB Host port, and "lost" the serial port (in some cases the components were not fitted to the motherboard or were incapable of driving the regular serial adaptor cables). The keyboard feel and layout changed somewhat, and most owners preferred it over the 760/860."

Varti

[slaanesh]

Never tried rogue unfortunately. I'm more of a Mame and Doom/Quake guy

Rogue is a classic! Should give it a try.

But MAME is also my love; I've been porting MAME4ALL and XMAME to various handhelds for years - my speciality is high optimization and making things work where previously they did not.
If you have a Dingoo A320/A380, Gemei A330, GCW-Zero, Pandora, GP2X, Wiz or Nanonote I have it already ported!

So what are the major differences between 1000/3000 and 860? Perhaps ALARM will work?  I'd be interested to see what your results would be.

Not much, according to Wikipedia: "(The SL-C3000) featured a similar hardware and software specification to the earlier C860 model; the key differences were that it only had 16 MB of flash memory yet gained an internal 4 GB Hitachi microdrive, a USB Host port, and "lost" the serial port (in some cases the components were not fitted to the motherboard or were incapable of driving the regular serial adaptor cables). The keyboard feel and layout changed somewhat, and most owners preferred it over the 760/860."

So... what's stopping this from working using, say, the SL-C1000's frankenstein kernel?

And one last thing, what's the latest "best" version of pdaXrom for SL-C860?
I've installed - randomly r121 - as I thought it was later than the betas, but I'm suspecting this is an older build.
In which case I should have installed r197, anyway...


Okay I found out that r121 is later than the beta builds.
And that there is pdaXii13 which sits somewhere between the beta builds and the 'r1xx' builds.
pdaXii13 seems to be the way to go? And it does mention support for SL-C860 (corgi/charlie) but only the akita/sally builds seem to be available.
It's all a bit confusing.

I can either stay with r121.
Upgrade to r197.
Or  go with pdaXii13, I think this is the correct install for my SL-C860?
http://members.iinet.net.au/~wyso/myZaurus/pdaXii13/akita/

[Varti]

Sorry for the late reply.

Never tried rogue unfortunately. I'm more of a Mame and Doom/Quake guy

Rogue is a classic! Should give it a try.

But MAME is also my love; I've been porting MAME4ALL and XMAME to various handhelds for years - my speciality is high optimization and making things work where previously they did not.
If you have a Dingoo A320/A380, Gemei A330, GCW-Zero, Pandora, GP2X, Wiz or Nanonote I have it already ported!

That's great  Unfortunately I don't have any of those devices, my handhelds collection at the moment consists of various Zaurus models. My current goal is to have a portable MAME4ALL machine; I'm currently trying to make wifi work on my SL-C1000, then I'll try the official Arch Linux ARMv5 binary of MAME4ALL with the custom SDL and DirectFB libraries mentioned here: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=34405
I believe that your GP2X port of MAME4All was included in zgrom, a gaming oriented Z distro. It's run using GINGE, the GP2X binaries loader. It reportedly ran a bit slow, though, probably because it wasn't a native compile:
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=31955
BTW I don't know how many other users here are interested on running XMAME on the Z, though I'd love to see a faster, optimised version of it, to see what games it could manage to run full speed

So what are the major differences between 1000/3000 and 860? Perhaps ALARM will work?  I'd be interested to see what your results would be.

Not much, according to Wikipedia: "(The SL-C3000) featured a similar hardware and software specification to the earlier C860 model; the key differences were that it only had 16 MB of flash memory yet gained an internal 4 GB Hitachi microdrive, a USB Host port, and "lost" the serial port (in some cases the components were not fitted to the motherboard or were incapable of driving the regular serial adaptor cables). The keyboard feel and layout changed somewhat, and most owners preferred it over the 760/860."

So... what's stopping this from working using, say, the SL-C1000's frankenstein kernel?

The C1000's specific kexecboot could work, but it is not required on a C860 for the following reason: the two kexecboots provided with Alarmz are tweaked versions of the official kexecboots for Zaurus. One version is for C3x00 models only, and the frankenstein one is for the C1000 only. Otherwise, you can boot (or attempt to boot) Alarmz on any Zaurus using the official kexecs; you'll be only missing some tweaks which are included in the Alarmz's kexecs, like shorter booting time:

https://github.com/LinuxPDA/linux-kexecboot...us/kernel-4.4.8

I have managed to do some tests with Alarmz on my 860. I have tried to run the Alarmz's kexecboot for the C3x00 on it, and as expected it doesn't work (it freezes during the boot). The latest official kexec for 7x0 models (and for 860 as well) boots though without problems; I have tried to boot Alarmz with it, but it fails to find the SD card. The reason might be because of that kexec version not supporting f2fs partitions, or the C860 SD slot not supporting SDXC cards (C1000's one does), I'll do more tests in the next days.

And one last thing, what's the latest "best" version of pdaXrom for SL-C860?
I've installed - randomly r121 - as I thought it was later than the betas, but I'm suspecting this is an older build.
In which case I should have installed r197, anyway...


Okay I found out that r121 is later than the beta builds.
And that there is pdaXii13 which sits somewhere between the beta builds and the 'r1xx' builds.
pdaXii13 seems to be the way to go? And it does mention support for SL-C860 (corgi/charlie) but only the akita/sally builds seem to be available.
It's all a bit confusing.

I can either stay with r121.
Upgrade to r197.
Or  go with pdaXii13, I think this is the correct install for my SL-C860?
http://members.iinet.net.au/~wyso/myZaurus/pdaXii13/akita/

Yes, it is indeed quite confusing. I plan to update the Wiki pages, to clearly label what versions are available for each ROM, and what ROMs can be run on each model, though I have first to wait that the installed PHP here is updated to the latest version, so that I can update our MediaWiki installation.

Anyway, I have compiled a table with all the versions I could find with their release dates, based on the dates of the announce threads on the pdaxrom subforum. There were probably more releases, I'll have to keep searching. The release dates in brackets are estimates, based on the dates when they have been uploaded on the (now offline) zaurus.spy.org mirror. All these versions, starting from rc10, can be found in the feed below:

http://feed.zaurusfr.org/pdaxrom/download/

1.0.0             08/03/2004
1.0.5             (06/06/2004)
rc1                (18/08/2004)
rc2                (18/08/2004)
rc3                (??/??/2004)
rc5                (12/10/2004)
rc8                (28/12/2004)
rc9                (02/03/2005)
rc10              16/05/2005
rc11              09/09/2005
rc12              06/10/2005
1.1.0beta1     29/12/2005
1.1.0beta2     11/01/2006
1.1.0beta3     11/04/2006
1.1.0beta4       20/05/2006
1.1.0r121       19/09/2006
r197/r198      14/04/2007

As for which version is the best for the 860, unfortunately I don't know, each version behaves differently on each model. Beta1 seems to be the most stable on the 860: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?s=&...st&p=155141

Regarding pdaXii13: it is indeed a bugfixed version of pdaXrom, based on both beta1 and beta3. You should install the Akita (SL-C1000) version as you mentioned, the url you linked is the correct one. In this thread there are some hints on how to make it run on the 860: www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=23350.

EDIT: found another post where pdaXrom was starting to have problems on the 860 starting from the beta1: https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?s=&...st&p=141824.

Varti