Alright, it's on. The one which lit up blank was recognized as an unformatted USB drive. It formatted fine and i'm able to copy stuff to it, so in the worst case i have a 1GB flash drive in the shape of a MP4 player. Gonna mess around with s1giveio now.
Edit: I followed this thread:
FW 4 iPod Nano 3G clone -ZX-6302L-TLSTK V2.0 ACU7515
I typed in the exact same commands in s1giveio v1.4 (the one that you uploaded on rapidshare). Results confirm that the backlight is on A2, but at the end of the procedure in post 19 i get 00 00 same as
systembug gets in his post 20. Any help on that?
Uploaded with
ImageShack.us
Edit 2: I tried backing up the existing firmware with s1clone but i would get the semaphore timeout error after about 23MB. Tested on two laptops... After testing another two players which i could never get out of ADFU mode, i found one where the flash chip looked like it broke loose from the soldering on one side. I soldered the flash back, applied power, and...
IT POWERED UP!!!! I have ONE FULLY FUNCTIONING CHIPOD! Now time to dump that firmware by whatever means possible.
Edit yet again:
It's almost 5am but it was worth the wait - another one recovered! Let's take it step by step shall we?
I used s1clone to dump the "soul" of the working player. Fortunately i found my way around that stupid semaphore error, and that is - use USB 1.1 ports. It'll make things sloooooowwww, but it'll work. I quickly found that my old crappy Pentium III isn't up to the task at running stable for the 2-3 hours needed to get an image from the player (bad motherboard), and my laptops have no useful options in the BIOS so it was time for plan B. That is, booting up the main computer and disabling USB 2.0 in the BIOS. That seemed to work a treat, and the firmware dump completed in a little under two hours.
I then soldered the cable to the device that would start up with a black screen but get into removable disk mode (yes i still don't have a proper cable to go with them, damn Chinese not using miniUSB), and instructed s1clone to flash it with the firmware i had just dumped. I left verification off, because i was sure it would take a LONG LONG TIME if i verified too. The flash completed in about 3.5 hours. And what do you know... The player booted up and everything works fine.
The only problem is that neither of the players plays nice with USB 2.0 ports (copying is very slow and unresponsive). I don't blame them since my makeshift cable is only rated for USB 1.1 and it's longer than needed too. So, now time for some sleep, and tomorrow i'll be hunting for cables to go with those things. Well, if i can find miniUSB ports i think i'd be better off hacking those into the players.
Then it'll be a matter of figuring out how to kick the other players out of ADFU mode so they can be spoon-fed this clean firmware i got. The only computer i can install the ADFU drivers on is the unstable Pentium III, since all other PCs in this house run 64-bit, and mom's P4 which runs win7 32 for some reason does not recognize the chipods at all. Maybe it's just my crappy cable, i'll see when i buy new ones tomorrow. Worst-case scenario - either get my lazy ass to fix the PIII motherboard, or drop a spare hard drive in my main computer and install XP 32-bit on that. Oh wait, there was that thing that booted a live XP from a CD. I forgot how it's called but i think i have it somewhere, i think i'll be able to use that.
Oh, and... The dump will be getting uploaded tomorrow for anyone else who might need it.