[penartur]

I've tired of having deal with the apple, so i'm thinking of going to another jukebox. Toshiba X seems the only one with rockbox support and zif hdd, so:
1) What is its SQ compared to an ipod video?
2) What about its UI? I wonder how can you do something with this single cross button (ok, 5 buttons).
2) Have anyone tried upgrading it with >138GB HDD (i'm not sure it has LBA48 support)?
And strange, but it seems that nobody solds it. Is it really so hard to find?

 

[penartur]

Anybody?

 

[ericj]

As i understand it, the X series is rare outside of Japan. It was replaced with the S series which was buried when Microsoft paid Toshiba to replace the S with the Zune 30, which is an S series gigabeat with wifi and a firmware loader that has good cryptographic hash verification, much to the dismay of rockbox hackers. (It was easy to trick the S series into loading a 3rd party firmware image. The zune will be much harder.)

The S series uses a ZIF harddrive and rockbox works on it with a few minor caviats: the installation procedure is slightly tricky still, the bootloader code is in it's infancy (but works for most people), and the power management code is unfinished.

The X was only available in 30gb iirc, which means it has a 5mm harddrive and cannot accommodate a drive with two platters, which would include all the really huge drives out there.

The zif harddrive is about the only difference between the X and the F. Several people have successfully installed 100 and 120gb drives in the F40 and F60 with a cheap adapter sandwiched into the case - there's plenty of room for it. I don't know if anyone has tried a 240gb drive in an F or S yet. I do know that they're working on a fully flashed rockbox for the F that would completely replace the original firmware, and that would certainly provide support for lba48 drives if it doesn't exist yet.

Last night i installed a MK1214GAH 120gb drive in one of my S60's and that at least is working fine.

Right now an S series gigabeat gets about 4 hours of battery life in rockbox. Should be closer to 14. Big important pieces of power management code like actually bothering to use the cpu frequency scaling features are completely missing. They will turn up eventually. An F with an upgraded battery can go for almost 20 hours.

I don't have an ipod video or know anyone who has one, but the F and S gigabeats have very good sound quality IMHO even as compared to my H120.

Edit: Oh, about the UI. There's a row of buttons down the right-hand side of the case. On the F you have Power, Menu, VolUp, VolDown, and A. I believe the X is the same. In the standard rockbox configuration, "A" is mapped to play/pause and "Power" to stop. I altered my keymap and recompiled to flip those around - for the short press i mean. I have not submitted this as a patch to rockbox because the gigabeat FX keymap is a contentious issue, and I'd just be adding a third argument.

The touchpad on the F is not great but works. It doesn't do any of the nifty things you might do with a touchpad, and didn't in the original firmware either. It's just five really sensitive buttons that give you no tactile feedback.

The S has hard tactile buttons instead of the touchpad. It has the + navigation cluster on the front as well as "Back" and "Menu" buttons right above it, then on the right-hand side of the case there is Power, VolUp/Down (rocker), RW, Play, and FFW.

 

[penartur]

Quote:

The X was only available in 30gb iirc

According to HardDriveReplacement < Main < TWiki , there was also X60 with dual-platter HDD.
I've thought about S, but its poor battery life even under original firmware is making me sad. However, i've just noticed V series, 30 hours under original firmware with original battery seems to be quite good.

Thanks for the info about SQ/interface

it seems i definitely should replace my ipod with one of these toshibas

UPD: Hell, V30 is 220g, its really heavy

 

[ericj]

Ah, I was unaware of the X60.

Yeah, the V series is huge, and the trim plastic is very thin and brittle and cracks very easily. And the headphone jack breaks off the board easy, and the repair is less simple than it sounds. I have a broken one here.

Also i don't think rockbox runs on the V yet. It's almost exactly the same as the S, but not exactly the same.

An F40 with an upgraded battery and an upgraded harddrive might be just what you need. Better battery life than the X because you can fit a bigger battery in it. But the F40 isn't exactly svelt either - with the 1200mAh battery mine weighs 163g.

If you want to hold out for an X60, your best bet might be yahoo japan.

 

[penartur]

Quote:

If you want to hold out for an X60, your best bet might be yahoo japan.

Yes, i'm already monitoring InJapan.ru — Ðукцион Yahoo (our local "broker" for buying goods on japan auctions), but there is no x60's now...
Quote:

An F40 with an upgraded battery and an upgraded harddrive might be just what you need

I doubt if it is large enough to host both high-capacity battery and toshiba->zif adapter in addition to a dual-platter hdd?

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by penartur /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yes, i'm already monitoring InJapan.ru — Ðукцион Yahoo (our local "broker" for buying goods on japan auctions), but there is no x60's now... I doubt if it is large enough to host both high-capacity battery and toshiba->zif adapter in addition to a dual-platter hdd?

The F series is a little weird in that respect. The battery is on the 'front' side of the circuit board directly behind the touchpad. The touchpad is actually loose in the case and the battery holds it against the front panel.

The stock battery is 830mAh and has little rubber pads on the back to hold it up so that the touchpad is flush with the front of the case.

If you get a 1200mAh cameron-sino battery for a 4th generation ipod and sand down the inside of the bezel for the touchpad a bit, and toss the little rubber battery pads, that all fits very neatly on the front.

There's a common problem with F's where the factory battery will start to expand even though it is still performing reasonably well, and this causes the touchpad to malfunction. I got a 16-hour batterybench run out of an 830mAh battery that had already expanded by about 2mm at the center.

The HDD in the F40 is already a double-platter deal, and there is some room above the headphone and power jacks for the adapter, from the look of things. They've been fitted with 120gb double platter zif drives by at least two people here on head-fi and i think there's a thread with pictures somewhere.

The X series is a little thinner and doesn't have the pads under the battery, so the maximum that will fit is a 1000mAh i think.

By the way, if you see a broken F or presumably also an X that is just giving a boot error of like 0000020 (or a few of the other error messages), commonly this means that someone deleted or corrupted the GBSYSTEM folder on the drive, or reformatted it or something. All you have to do is reformat with fat32 and dump on a GBSYSTEM folder that contains the rockbox bootloader. Occasionally the boot errors mean that the harddrive is dead but it's more common that someone just damaged the filesystem.

My first F40 was actually formatted NTFS but had the factory GBSYSTEM folder on it. If the previous owner hadn't mangled the case and lost some of the plastic bits that would have been the only problem with it.

I've got a zip file here somewhere that just contains a minimal GBSYSTEM w/ the bootloader.

 

[penartur]

Quote:

The battery is on the 'front' side of the circuit board directly behind the touchpad. The touchpad is actually loose in the case and the battery holds it against the front panel.

This is just like on NW-HD5

Quote:

By the way, if you see a broken F or presumably also an X that is just giving a boot error of like 0000020 (or a few of the other error messages), commonly this means that someone deleted or corrupted the GBSYSTEM folder on the drive, or reformatted it or something. All you have to do is reformat with fat32 and dump on a GBSYSTEM folder that contains the rockbox bootloader. Occasionally the boot errors mean that the harddrive is dead but it's more common that someone just damaged the filesystem.

Wow, thanks

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by penartur /img/forum/go_quote.gif This is just like on NW-HD5 Wow, thanks

Yeah. The temptation to, um, not tell people that, has been nagging. But i think given that i own three F40's I really don't need any more cheap broken gigabeats.

It was never exactly a secret, but, not many people actually report success in fixing the boot problems.

I think part of the situation is that it really needs to be proper fat32, and vista will tell you it's writing fat32 and actually write fat64. And mkdosfs under linux isn't good enough. I've used the 'fat32format' tool on vista with fairly uniform success - and fwiw swissknife was a total flop too.

 

[penartur]

Quote:

and vista will tell you it's writing fat32 and actually write fat64.

There is no such filesystem "fat64". Until you're using a third-party tools (e.g. `fat32format'), windows (both XP and Vista) will not allow you to choose between FAT32 and NTFS for volumes >32GB, the only option will be NTFS

 

[penartur]

I've just understand what do you mean by this boot screen error, it seems that toshiba and kenwood's internals are very similar, kenwood displayed the same 00000020 error until booting in recovery mode (and after i copied KWSYSTEM folder on a new hdd it booted to a normal mode).
I wonder what will be with toshiba if i will upload contents of KWSYSTEM into its GBSYSTEM

Also, it means that there really should be no problems with large HDDs. I've tried HD60GD9 with the same 240GB HDD and the only problem was that HDD is to thick for it.

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by penartur /img/forum/go_quote.gif There is no such filesystem "fat64". Until you're using a third-party tools (e.g. `fat32format'), windows (both XP and Vista) will not allow you to choose between FAT32 and NTFS for volumes >32GB, the only option will be NTFS

what I've read is that even for volumes under 32gb, on vista, if your're formatting with the tools that come with the operating system, it's still not going to be fat32 in the same sense that it was under XP.

 

[penartur]

Quote:

what I've read is that even for volumes under 32gb, on vista, if your're formatting with the tools that come with the operating system, it's still not going to be fat32 in the same sense that it was under XP.

What you've read is wrong.
It seems that vista is using new NTFS version, with some features absent in XP's NTFS; but old legacy fat32 is fat32, no matter how did you get it (if you've used tools released in 21st century).

PS: I've just thought that maybe you're talking about exFAT? exFAT is completely different from FAT32, the only common between them is name. However, when formatting removable media volume under 32gb, vista should ask you what FS do you want, FAT32 or exFAT (or possibly NTFS).

 

[ericj]

probably exfat

 

[Booda]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ericj /img/forum/go_quote.gif The F series is a little weird in that respect. The battery is on the 'front' side of the circuit board directly behind the touchpad. The touchpad is actually loose in the case and the battery holds it against the front panel. The stock battery is 830mAh and has little rubber pads on the back to hold it up so that the touchpad is flush with the front of the case. If you get a 1200mAh cameron-sino battery for a 4th generation ipod and sand down the inside of the bezel for the touchpad a bit, and toss the little rubber battery pads, that all fits very neatly on the front. There's a common problem with F's where the factory battery will start to expand even though it is still performing reasonably well, and this causes the touchpad to malfunction. I got a 16-hour batterybench run out of an 830mAh battery that had already expanded by about 2mm at the center. The HDD in the F40 is already a double-platter deal, and there is some room above the headphone and power jacks for the adapter, from the look of things. They've been fitted with 120gb double platter zif drives by at least two people here on head-fi and i think there's a thread with pictures somewhere. The X series is a little thinner and doesn't have the pads under the battery, so the maximum that will fit is a 1000mAh i think. By the way, if you see a broken F or presumably also an X that is just giving a boot error of like 0000020 (or a few of the other error messages), commonly this means that someone deleted or corrupted the GBSYSTEM folder on the drive, or reformatted it or something. All you have to do is reformat with fat32 and dump on a GBSYSTEM folder that contains the rockbox bootloader. Occasionally the boot errors mean that the harddrive is dead but it's more common that someone just damaged the filesystem. My first F40 was actually formatted NTFS but had the factory GBSYSTEM folder on it. If the previous owner hadn't mangled the case and lost some of the plastic bits that would have been the only problem with it. I've got a zip file here somewhere that just contains a minimal GBSYSTEM w/ the bootloader.

Thank for the explanation, very informative.