Marek microsite

Well. I got me a PDA. A Loox 610 BT from fujitsu-siemens. Used of course, and a brick too. Quite dead a brick to be exact. It was sold as good, arrived with a crashed flash, I won’t dig into the seller-buyer relations, but let’s say, I was left with an expensive paperweight in my hand.

0. Who can profit from my experience?

This text might help you if your PDA:
– doesn’t switch on at all (using the power button)
– switches on, but shows just a green screen (or whatever unicolor screen)
– switches on and shows only the startup screen (and either stays so forever or dies out in a moment)
– you attempted a flash update and it failed.
or
– you did a flash update, it sucks and you can’t get it downgraded.

However, your PDA must not be completely dead, this means in particular:
1) when plugged in it should charge (blinking LED that goes on when the battery is full)
2) when turned on with the monkey-grip it should show some sort of bootloader (see following section on what the monkey grip is)
3) your PDA, when powered on and plugged into USB, shall NOT be recognized by the PC (active Sync / device manager) – does not apply if you need a downgrade.

Why so?

First, if it’s dead to the point it won’t take charge, the internal power circuitry is either damaged or locked up to an extent, that will prevent even an otherwise healthy PC from starting. Read: you might have a good ,,smart part” and you are missing the ,,power cord” to get it going. No point in fixing what ain’t broken.

Then, if the bootloader isn’t there, or is dead for some reason, you have absolutely no way to get the firmware in, out or booted. It just doesn’t matter WHY it fails, I just can’t help you, go on looking for a solution, maybe there’s one, but I don’t have it.

The last thing is, if your PDA does get recognized when attached to PC’s USB port, it simply isn’t dead. If you can’t see a thing, it means that your LCD is dead, or backlight is off, or something, but the system behind it is up and running and – if you wish – you can reflash the PDA from your desktop PC without the tricks here. Possibly it will help anyway, possibly not, sure will be less risky then the procedures here. However, read on about the monkey-grip, it can be useful if you need a flash downgrade.

I. The Monkey Grip

PC’s have (or used to have, as it has changed somewhat now) the [ctrl]-[alt]-[del] three-finger-salute paid to dead software. PocketPCs have something similar too. However, don’t mistake it with a soft reset, which is more soft than a reset!

The reset options for a pocket Loox, from lowest-impact to the most-devastating one, are as follows:

(o) the soft reset: punch the small button in the hole, the device reboots. Your data is there, your settings are there, just the misbehaving app was killed (and whatever you didn’t save is gone).

(-) the hard-software reset: hold the power button, punch the soft-reset button. The device re-initializes the system. Say your byes to your data, settings, programs and such. It’s all clean now (except LooxStore and your SD/CF cards). The power is not interrupted, it’s all software, but it leaves nothing behind! It seems, that this kind of a reset is not available in all firmwares.

(o) some devices (Loox 610) have a hardware reset switch. It’s actually rather a main power switch, it just disconnects the secondary battery and so all data in RAM dies. System gets re-initialized afterwards. This is true hardware reset, however not always available (some devices simply don’t have this switch).

(-) the MONKEY GRIP. It’s again a software call, but it not only kills all the data, it boots directly to a built-in low-level flasher instead of rebooting Windows Mobile OS. To activate this mode, do the following…

[ WARNING: even if you want to just-try, REMOVE ALL CARDS FROM THE DEVICE! And – your data, setting, all programs, EVERYTHING will go bye-bye even, if you just try it! You have been warned! ]

…switch the device off (if possible). Press and hold FSC-button/record button (the top button on the left side of the device), the power-on button and press the soft-reset. Keep holding both the power and side buttons till you see the flashloader screen.
Now what you see depends on what device do you actually have. Loox 610 shows some text-mode screen with a header that goes something like ,,Pocket PC OS Flash Loader”. Loox 420 shows the dolphin’s picture that comes upon standard boot, but now there are few letters at the top of the screen (the bootloader version and the system language). To exit this state you have to reset your device. Either a soft reset or a hard-softreset should do. Power switch won’t. Battery is not supervised in this mode, so the device will run till the lights go out! Plug the charger in, or you are in for trouble.

II. WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

If you have an SD card with a system image on it in the SD slot (or put one in when the bootloader is active), this bootloader will ,,pull” the image into the main flash memory. What the bootloader looks for is a file with a name that ends with `.nb0′ (that’s a zero, not an `O’). The file contents/internal layout is important too, the bootloader won’t flash just anything that’s called .nb0, however, it won’t check if this specific image is any good for your device or if it’s complete (!). If you don’t pay attention, you might e.g. x-flash a 610BT with 420’s firmware this way and dead-brick your pda.

Now, if your PDA won’t start normally, but will boot to the bootloader after performing the monkey-grip, it means, that either the main flash is corrupt, or it does not match the version of the bootloader. [WARNING: assumptions!] I believe, that when you update the flash of your Loox using the USB-Tool, first it updates the bootloader and then it sends the full flash image. It seems, that not every image can be booted by every bootloader version. What I know for sure is, that the newer images provided by FSC are in general not enough to revive a dead device. [Assumptions mode:off]. Now, if you have a dead flash and live bootloader, you fix flash, ok?

The following is accurate for the Loox 610BT. I don’t know to what extent does it apply to other versions.
Fujitsu-Siemens provides 6 versions of Firmware to download (two are misplaced on the website, marked as WM2003SE, although they are the original WM2003, so you have to check the ,,unsupported OS” checkbox to see them).

They are as follows:

German:
FSC_1002160.EXE P22452-P929-V526.NB0
P22452-P929-V526 1.00 [DE] Windows Mobile 2003 Released: 18.11.2003

FSC_1002161.EXE P22452-P929-V526.dat
P22452-P929-V526 1.01 [DE] Windows Mobile 2003 Released: 11.12.2003

FSC_1002162.EXE P22452-P929-V551.dat
P22452-P929-V551 1.00 [DE] Windows Mobile 2003 Released: 05.03.2004

English:
FSC_1002989.EXE P22452-P929-V527.NB0
P22452-P929-V527 1.00 [EN] Windows Mobile 2003 Released: 18.11.2003 (*)

FSC_1002988.EXE P22452-P929-V527.dat
P22452-P929-V527 1.01 [EN] Windows Mobile 2003 Released: 11.12.2003 (*)

FSC_1002163.EXE P22452-P929-V552.dat
P22452-P929-V552 1.00 [EN] Windows Mobile 2003 Released: 11.02.2004

(*)- these are mistakenly reported on FSC website to be WM2003SE. They are not.

As you can see, there are the original releases (v52x 1.00), the first updates (to v52x 1.01) and then a major update to v55x.
The last digit tells the FW language, so v526 == v527 except for that the first one is german and the second one is english.
The very first update in each language ist actually not an update, but a PRIMARY RELEASE, i.e. the original flash that got shipped. It is also an NB0 file, which means, it can be safely flashed directly from an SD card. This is what you need if your device is half-dead (i.e. bootloader OK, but no system).

III. HOW TO REVIVE MY LOOX?

0. Get the firmware from FSC. The filenames for Loox 610 are lised above for your reference. Install it to your harddrive, check for the NB0 file in the installed directory (default c:\fsc.temp).

1. Get a good SD card, 64MB is enough, 1GB is maximum officially supported. Format it as FAT. Put the NB0 file in the main dir. Pay attention to the language: the bootloader (at least in Loox 610BT) does not check the flash language before flashing, so if you screw it up you may wake up with your pda in german!

DON’T rename .DAT to .NB0: they will flash, but the device will be dead, just get the proper NB0 file.

Warning: the bootloader WILL find the right file even if the card is not empty, but due to a bug in the initial bootloader it may crash if the NB0 file comes up too late in the list. So CLEAR the card and play safe.

2. Remove CF cards, unplug any connectors except for the power supply, charge the battery (so if the lights go out it keeps running). Doublecheck that everything is in place, SD card secure in the slot, and do the monkey-grip. If you did it right, the flash loader will come up and start reading your NB0 file in. After few moments it will start writing the flash. Cross your fingers and wait till it finishes. Once it says it’s finished, press the power button. ALLOW PLENTY OF TIME FOR THE FIRST BOOT, it has taken almost two minutes for my pda to initialize! It’s definitely longer than the usual soft-reset.

3. Remember to remove the NB0 file from the SD card. If you don’t, you will have problems when upgrading your device later.

4. Optional: update your PDA to the newest flash release (use ActiveSync and the Update Tool from FSC).

Good luck,
Marek
locust@poczta.onet.pl

It’s been a while since my last post. A lot of things happened.

I’ve switched over almost completely to analog. I don’t touch my digital cam except for the cases when I want to have something real fast, or when I want to have it in color. It’s not like that I believe film to be truly better yadda yadda, it’s just that I spend like 10 hours a day in front of a PC at work every day and it’s enough. Film gives me pictures without the PC 🙂

Still, as I want to email some pictures every now and then, I got me a scanner. I got me a complete darkroom too, no worry, no more guerilla works like before 🙂 but still – no scanner, no photos online and that’s too bad 😛

[ click ]

Well, since I used only a 6×6 on the trip to Italy, I have now a ,,tiny” problem of getting to see the photos I took 😀 I decided to try contact-printing them, and yestarday I’ve set a guerilla-darkroom up.
I’ve used:

• a plastic ice-cream box for the developer tray
• two glass jars — stop bath and fixer
• I had no paper developer, so I used Rodinal
• I had no stop bath, so I have diluted some citric acid and crossed my fingers
• I had no copying frame, so I glued a small sheet of foam rubber onto some board and got a piece of thick glass frosted on one side to press this sandwich flat
• I had no enlarger and no timer, so I counted the time out aloud and used a bare bulb of my vanity mirror lamp
• I used plastic clips, such meant for hanging laundry, to move paper around my ,,trays”
• I used a small neon light in a red cap as my safelight 🙂 Wasn’t really providing any usable light, but halped me to keep oriented in the darkness
• and last, but not least, my paper has still ,,made in DDR” stamps on the pack…

Here’s the very first print I’ve managed to make:

Don’t complain too much, the scanner used was the one built into my office photocopier, it wasn’t ever meant to scan photos 😛

After a week of travelling around I’m back from my holiday in Italy. I did not take any digital camera, except for the one built into my mobile phone 😉 so it will take a moment till I post some photos.

I have tried myself with a twin-lens-reflection Yashica Mat — a 6×6 MF camera, a lovely thing the size of a shoebox. I love it. Silent shutter — [click] and it’s there — no mirror slap, no viewfinder blackout, you shoot from the waist level, so you the perspective is better when shooting people, it’s discrete and it’s got a — 6×6 — bright matte screen. If all you have seen till now were APS-C class dSLR viewfinders you better sit before you have look into one like this here 🙂

Sure, it’s nowhere close to the ,,top”, mainly since there’s no ,,top” — you can make it better if you put more money in, period.

—

blah, blah on technical BS, but it’s not why we went for a trip, isn’t it?
Okay, the time was short and we wanted to see a lot, so it was kinda intense. We started by going to Milano, but we stayed there only for several hours, had a look around the cathedral and a bit of the old town and then we moved to Pisa. We spent the first night in Italy there, actually I screwed the organisation a good bit — we could have had a night view of Pisa, but hadn’t, because I haven’t had checked the buses beforehand and it turned out, that we’d have to walk back to the hostel (located in the outskirts…). Anyway, we slept and refreshed we took a sturm on the Pisa’s Leaning Tower, had a peek into the Baptisterium and a short rest at the ancient cementery. We walked across the oldtown and had a dinner at a small restaurant. In the early afternoon we moved on to Firenze. The hotel owner, Bettricia, picked us up at the railway station and gave us a ride to the place we were to stay.
After we stuffed our luggage there and had a quick shower we left for an evening round through the city. Charming. Pisa looked small and old, Florence looked big and old. Both felt like an old city living, unlike Rome, where I had the feeling, that people try living a modern life on ruins of an ancient, long dead civilisation. Well, whatever.
We’ve had as much look of Firenze, as we could, on the following day. We stayed there in total two nights and on Tuesday morning left for Roma.

Roma disappointed me… Maybe I have just expected too much, or maybe ist’s destiny of every old, huge agglomeration, but it felt to me like new life was trying to live around the artifacts of the ancient empire rather than enjoying it. You know, like an owner of an old house, who feels burdened by the need to keep the original look of his property rather than wanting himself to preserve it. I don’t know if I can make this feeling clear…
Whatever. The main checklist had to be read, we’ve been thru it all — Colosseo, Palatinat, Forum Romanum, San Petro, the famed museum of Vatican (hey, do they have any descriptions for their collections, or they themselves don’t have a clue of what they show?! No map, no tags, either go study art’s history before or feel dumb like we did), San Angelo, and, and, and. We stayed for three days and we could just as well stay another month, it wouldn’t be enough really to see it all. We were running low on time and wanted still to see Venezia, so we left on Thursday evening on a night train heading north…

Venezia! This was really a pearl of our trip. Two days went by REALLY fast, the city is beautiful and if you avoid the surroundings of San Marco — almost tourist free (sic!). Although the city gets visited by more than 20 Million tourists a year, they mostly stay in the city center and avoid geting lost in the labirynth of small streets, bridges and channels. Just forget that map you have, we had like three of them and none really listed all streets correctly. There street names repeat, there are many places called just the same, not all bridges are marked and some marked turn non-existing. Houses are not numbered by streets, but by districts, and pretty at random if we’re at it. good luck, the trip will be lovely! Just start looking for a way out something like an hour before you need to depart, you can get to the station from just about wherever in the city within one hour so no worries 😛

Well, Venezia was our last stop, we just took a sleeper back to Germany from there. As soon as I have my photos developed and scanned, I’ll post some…

A single postcard from TĂźbingen…

and a few photos from Lichtenstein (the one not too far away from Reutlingen…):
[click]

(both photos shot with Industar 50/2.8 mounted on an ancient Praktica FX3 – thanx Dizel!)

Hi. I’m back. I have brought several rolls of film, I have a lot of processing to do.
A few photos are out online, these I have processed still back home, in Gdansk.
If you like to peek 🙂
[click]