Sl-c3000 Paperweight

[benito]

Hello,

I've been playing around with my brand new SL-C3000 for two weeks, initially converting it and then installing all sorts of stuff. During the first two days I rebooted the device a couple of times (shutdown didn't seem to work but reboot worked fine) but after the latest reboot, it seemed stuck at the initial screen with the SHARP logo.

I can't read what it says exactly, but it looks like the grep command can't find the stab file or something. It loops indefinitely and if I CTRL-C it, the machine reboots. After some investigation on the web, I found out that I can get into the service menus by pressing D-M or D-P while attaching AC power. I've seen a NAND Flash Restore option on page 3 but I havent got a backup of the OS image on CF. (only on the internal HD...) Does anybody know whether I can just write the image that I've downloaded from Conics (SYSTC300.DBK) to a CF card using some other device and restore from that? Also, are there any pitfalls in using this functionality that I should be aware of?

Of course it would be my preference to solve this issue from the Zaurus itself: I've also read that you can boot into a console directly by pressing D-B but this doesn't seem to work for me... Does anybody know how to get this to work on the SL-C3000? The only thing I can get into at the moment are the service menus - the Japanese menu that I got by pressing "Ok" at bootup doesn't work either anymore...

If anybody can give me some hints, I'd appreciate it enormously.

Many thanks!!!
Ben

[hubcapboy]

not 3k info, but I use the the nand backup/restore utility in the diagnostic menu ALL the time.  I back up before I mess with something new, and then restore when I screw things up royally.  I've moved the back up file (6k calls it syst0006.dbk) all over the place and all I've got to do is copy it to the cf and it'll restore from it.

[benito]

Ok that's good news. I'll copy the image on a CF and see if it works.

Thanks!
Ben

[TRIsoft]

NAND Backup / Restore will NOT rescue a SL-C3000.
The OS is not stored in the NAND. Please read the
manual for factory reset and console boot:
SL-C3000 manual download

///TRIsoft

Marc Stephan

[benito]

Hi Marc,

Your manual rocks!!!!

Initially I couldn't get back into the "Ok" menu (only in the service menus) but with your documentation I managed to get into a prompt ( D+B ) albeit after trying a few times. After performing a reboot with the root user, the "Ok" menu worked again and I could restore the machine in it's original Japanese status. (now first let's get a shell back...)

Many thanks indeed.
Ben

[TRIsoft]

Hi Ben,

good to see that your Zaurus-shaped-paperweight
is back into action.

That's what manuals are for :-)

Marc

[devster]

Does the D+M also wipe all the partitions, including the user data area??

cheers,
D.

[benito]

Well... D+M doesn't wipe anything as far as I know (just gets you into the service menus) but the stuff in the "Ok" menu mentioned in my previous posts does (at least when I did it I lost everything I'd done and the machine was back into it's original state).

I've since then converted dev/hda3 (mounted under /hdd3) to ext3 and put Debian on it, so I don't know how it would react to that but I presume it will just re-create the partitions in their original state (so /dev/hda3 would be vfat again I recon).

By the way: after a few more brick events I discovered that it was the smbclient package that caused the machine to fail at boot. I've given up on the client and just run the server on my SL-C3000 - works like a charm ;-)

Cheers,
Ben

[HackerJL]

Many MANY thanks for the walkthrough, solved a lot of problems for me...thanks