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
