Restore A Sl-6000 Sharp Rom Without Using Nand

[pldrouin]

Is it possible to restore a sl-6000 Sharp ROM without using NAND? I've read that it was possible to permanently damage a Zaurus with a NAND restore and that it is not the case with a "updater.sh restore". All the Sharp ROMs I've found until now are NAND.

Thanks

[Mickeyl]

guylhem has a a component split NAND on his site. If we find out what component is what we would refer to as zimage.bin and initrd.bin, we could try to flash that using updater.sh

[pldrouin]

According to what I understand from http://www.externe.net/zaurus/flash/nandmap.jpg and http://www.externe.net/zaurus/flash/backup.sh, the critical parts that should be avoided to be flashed are 0x00000000 to 0x000DBFFF, except the range 0x00070000-0x00073FFF that contains the master version (This seams to be changed depending on the rom). So the following updater.sh file would be safe:

#!/bin/sh

restore () {
        Start=`printf "%d" $2`
        Count=`expr $3 \* 1024`

        ./nandlogical /dev/mtd1 WRITE $Start $Count $1
}

cd /mnt/cf || exit 1

restore zimage1.bin 0x000E0000 1264
restore zimage2.bin 0x00220000 1264
restore initrd.gz 0x00360000 3328
restore initrd.bin 0x00700000 28672
restore initfs.bin 0x02300000 29696
restore mversion.bin 0x00070000 16

Do you think it makes sense? This script would be the updater.sh script to be used to safely put back the Sharp ROM without risking to permanently brick a Zaurus.

[Mickeyl]

Looks reasonable to me. Who wants to be the guinea pig though?  

[poorman]

Hi guys,

guinea pig wants to share his experience with you. For impatient reader - it didn't work.

Well, I thought it is reasonable to use described "limited" list of files to be flashed. I was thinking about something similar before a found this thread. I can see one problem there - size of initrd.bin and initfs.bin. In backup.sh and your derived updater.sh are next sizes

restore initrd.bin 0x00700000 28672
restore initfs.bin 0x02300000 29696

as far as I understand it initrd.bin should be 28672*1024 = 29360128 bytes long
and initfs.bin should be 29696*1024 = 30408704 bytes long

However real sizes of these files are (taken from http://www.externe.net/zaurus/flash/SL6000L-US-1.12.zip)

initrd.bin has 27459600
initfs.bin has 851984

It's strange that real sizes are not rounded to whole 1024 blocks.

It was a big fight before I decided to ignore this differences in size. Finally I decided to flash it. I've used the same script which pldrouin sent in his post. With small modification for SD card (cd /mnt/card  instead cd /mnt/cf).

After boot flashing has started. nandlogical is quite verbose so I've seen what it is doing (lot of "write" messages with ofset, etc.). I was possible to see "breaks" among various files. Finally it writes "...invalid argument" and it rebooted immediatelly. So I'm not sure where exactly the error was and what exactly it said. However it seems that it was due described problem with sizes. I think that it flashed initrd.bin but it was shorter than option passed to nandlogical so it failed.

After reboot it started but it was a bit magic. First original "SHARP" image was displayed but it was overrided by openzaurus booting procedure in few seconds.
GPE has started but touchscreen wasn't working any more. I tried to flash OpenZaurus rom once more but it wasn't possible. It complained that dialog is not possible to find. I extract dialog from bootstrap.bin and store it in the root of SD card together with rom file and uptater.sh. After this modification it was possible to flash openzaurus rom by standard way...

So finally I have openzaurus again on my 6000 bu I'm still looking for "safe" procedure to flash it to original SHARP rom. Why? Well, there are few anyoing thinks especially keyboard and buttons are not working properly and it's not possible to control backlight.

Cheers, PM

[Mickeyl]

FWIW, I recently restored the SharpROM after having OZ on my 6000 by using guylhem's zip of the US 1.03 ROM, putting it onto a CF and holding C+D while switching the 6000 on. Worked like a charm.

[poorman]

Well, some link to "guylhem's zip"? BTW, it's US 1.03 ROM but what about 1.12 ROM?

[poorman]

Well, I given up and I did NAND restore with original sharp rom. I followed instructions from next post

https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showt...indpost&p=50945

Cheers, PM

[guylhem]

FWIW, I recently restored the SharpROM after having OZ on my 6000 by using guylhem's zip of the US 1.03 ROM, putting it onto a CF and holding C+D while switching the 6000 on. Worked like a charm.
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I can swear it's working like a charm. Not only you, but Eddie Chan also used my dumps to restore his zaurus. Used it on a couple of 6000 - my W and a friend's L, both coming from Japan.

This gave them full english support. I tried to flash my former US 6000 L with the japaneese dump and sure enough it also worked - I then reverted to the US rom

Anyway I'm sorry to hear there's a mistake with the sizes. If anyone wants to spend some time with that, I'd be happy to post an update.

[nhorlock]

Guys,
I recently acquired a 6000L which is flashed to OZ3.5.2 which is fine (its issues aside) but I want to flash back to Sharp just to know that I can and to compare the two products (while I'm waiting for 3.5.3). However I need some help here as  I'm obviously missing something. Please bear with me as I want to cover all the steps I've taken so that anyone else following in my footsteps can relate their experience with mine (and hopefully achieve a resolution)

step 1) I've got my CF card and unzipped the 1.12 ROM zip from externe (and also tried one from thegrantclan.org which is identical). Using these files alone and attempting a flash using reset+q+t leads to infinitely flashing LEDs (presumably something is not found).
step 2) Switching to reset+Pwr+OK then selecting update from CF gives more info (as expected...)  /mnt/cf/updater.sh is not found.
step 3) is to install updater.sh, again I've used the externe/zaurus/flash updater.sh and this is found and runs OK.

Note: The updater.sh flashes just the RO filesystem and then the "Maser" (presumably a typo for master). It does not find zImage and this is obvious when you take a look at the updater.sh as the zip file has zimage.bin but updater looks for various capitalizations of zImage but never for a .bin extension.

step 4) rename zimage.bin to zImage and try again from step 2.
Kernel is found (hooray) and successful RoFS is installed OK. Mas(t)er also apparent a success.
Problem solved you'd think....'fraid not.

The reboot proceeds to stream "/usr/sharp/etc/launch.conf can not open file" messages until init intervenes due to too many respawns.

Could it be that the initfs.bin also needs to be installed. It is not mentioned by the updater.sh but does feature in the updater.pro file. However as this is a pure guess and given that many in this thread profess to having been succesful with this process I can only assume that I have done something wrong. Any ideas?

My problem sounds like that experienced by jeffbarish in the "How to Restore a 6000L ...." thread, indeed he clearly had the zimage.bin issue but he appears to have got round that using "reset+d+p" but for me I get "CF Update Can not initialize."

Finally, I am just trying the updater.sh from thegrantclan which is more comprehensive, though amusingly it seems to expect zImage.bin and not find zimage so remember to rename it back again (if you've previously renamed it). Still no luck though, exactly the same problem, it does however try to mount a filesystem as part of the process but apparently fails so perhaps this is where the problem lies........

Help!

Oh well its 2:30 AM here so I'd better get some sleep, my daughter will be expecting to go hunt for some easter eggs in a few hours.

[nhorlock]

I need some help here as  I'm obviously missing something.

Well, I've done it. Sharp rom is now back. In the end it appears to be a hardware issue. My observations on the updater.sh and soforth still appear to be correct however the key point for me seems to be that updater.sh is simply not needed to restore the Sharp ROM (perhaps implying that this thread is now the wrong place for this post!).

The final clue was the Wiki page here which states something like "if lights keep flashing, fiels are corrupt". Well I'd already checked them a number of times but finally I thought to try a different CF card and it worked first time (reset+q+t).

Problem solved. Thanks to whoever put the Wiki entry up as it served to force me to try the new card. I'm still puzzled as to quite what is wrong with the other card it shows no errors, but that is for another day.

Neil

[guylhem]

So my files are fine? good. I dind't know q+t could have such problems.

[nhorlock]

So my files are fine? good. I dind't know q+t could have such problems.
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Your files are problem free. Though the cut down updater.sh does ignore zimage.bin files but given that I was (I believe) misusing it, this may well be expected behaviour.

I knew that whatever the problem was it was likely to be me. Too many others had been fine, but dsespite following the two main "sharp restore" threads I was getting nowhere fast. I had spent ages trying different things and ,you know how it is, I suspect that I'd made a silly error early on and then gone down the wrong path completely with the updater script (Am I correct in thinking that the updater.sh is not intended/expected to work with original Sharp ROMs?), then by the time I got back to trying your zip archive again I'd probably stopped checksumming the files and thus shot myself in the foot.

Thanks for a great site (externe.net) it answered a lot of questions. The NAND map is very nice.

Neil

[guylhem]

Hello,

updater.sh *shoud* work with original roms, but only if you give a zimage and an initrd. else you have to use an updater.pro as you found in the zip.

If you had problems even with the other threads, may I ask you a quick documentation explaining what you did in your own words? I'm sure it would be helpful to other people experiencing the same problems.

PS: thanks for the compliment :-)

[seed]

please  anyone help me to go back to the sharp rom
i am a very newbies and so  i need a very slow turorial
thank