Very Dead Player Please Help Restore

[ljwrocker]

hello friends

i have quite a difficult problem with a player ive spent about 2 weeks trying to fix, heres whats up

its a Newsmy/Newman ManMan A5 4gb Rockchip 2706

turns on with entirely black screen, with only backlight on, when its turned on the red button LED flashes
but from then on it doesnt respond
when on it makes its usaual buzzing sound from the chip, but i noticed that when its plugged into
PC the buzz gets louder
Also when its plugged into PC i cannot access the flash (4gb) and it comes up with "please insert into drive g:"
same with the micro sd slot when a micro sd card is in.

heres what ive done

i first tried all things possible to recover it with a firmware flash, i have the latest FW from Newsmy
and tried to recover it with rk27 upgrade, product tool, mp3 player recoveries basically all the programs
for recovering rockchip players and even tried similar player FW (onda vx777) but all just came up with
some error message that basically says it couldnt be done , ive tried with writing my own ADFU driver
and using it to install FW but still nothing (VID: 071B, PID:3203)

so after that i gave up and thought about the unusal flash problem, so i went to basics
and tried basic flash drive recovery, by looking at the drives details hres what i got

file system: unknown
used space: 0 bytes
free space : 0 bytes

after googling topics i found that this may be the outcome of an bad format in the factory, and that
when buying a mp3/4 its recommended to format the flash ( TO ALL WITH NEW PLAYERS, FORMAT
ASAP TO AVOID WHAT IVE GOT!!)
but in other topics its says its easilly possible to fix this with programs such as WinHEX and Disk Explorer
so i gave them a go, but both failed!! but it seems that its recognised as a removeable drive!!?, (eg floppy disk drive)
and as of now im still working on this.

i want to try a hard reset, but how do you take these players a part !!?! no screws or anything to stick a screwdriver into

BTW ive tried emailing Newsmy, they have the worst customer service and havent replied in more than a week,
u give a go service@newsmy.com

does anybody have any ideas on to fix this, it would be great help please!

[AleMaxx]

Hi,
do you see the system disk i.e. a usb-drive which is about 90megs in size and has folders like "SYSTEM"?
If so you can copy new firmware files to that partition where by firmware files I mean those "SYSTEM" folders and files not a single file.
If you dont see it I can provide you with information how to make it visible and hwo to extract those firmware files and folders from a firmware update file (those that the Rockchip device manager expects), that would require some programming knowledge though (you mentioned you started to write your own driver).

Regards

[ljwrocker]

no i cannot see that partition, and i cannot get access to it via rkusb.tag as the main partition is damaged,
is by any chance the info you can provide involves the rk27DM tool? ive tried that but the issue is that
it works with normal drivers but cannot flash, and dosnt even work at all with rk27 drivers, and the restore button
is blanked.

if not im trying a hack to access that partition with Linux as seen on another site, (im running XP pro sp3)
so im downloading now the latest "damn small linux" (only 50mb!)

anything to help me fix this player would be great, i do have a considerable amount of programming experience
( made my own ps1 to usb controller adapter from old parts of a ps1,
it took me a month to write the programming! and im only 15 lol)

so anything would be great thanks

[AleMaxx]

Hi,
indeed I wrote a linux based tool that unlocks the hidden firmware partition, I uploaded it here: http://alemaxx.al.funpic.de/rk27/usbrocker.c. You need to compile it but I doubt that DSL comes with a compiler, normally you would install "build-essential" on linux to get everything you need to compile things. To compile that c-file just type

"gcc usbrocker.c -o usbr"

which would give you an executable called "usbr". Anyway, here is how it works:
After you plugin your player it should get detected as a SCSI device (if its not detected as an USB drive). To verify type (in the console):

dmesg | tail

which should give you (among other messages) sth like:

[91605.803808] sd 73:0:0:2: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0

then type (assuming you compiled that little tool and in the same drectory):

sudo ./usbr /dev/sg4

where sg4 is the name of the SCSI drive that belongs to your player. This should yield:

usb rocker v0.001a
vendor : RockChipUSBDISK   Sys   1.00��
device is loaded

00000000 - F4 FF 09 B8 E0 04 0A B8 10 00 00 00 44 D8 FD BF     ............D...
00000010 - 13 D9 FB B7 E0 04 0A B8 0A 00 00 00 F4 FF 09 B8     ................
00000020 - E0 04 0A B8 68 D8 FD BF 4B 17 FB B7 E0 04 0A B8     ....h...K.......
00000030 - 0A 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 10 00 00 00 F4 FF 09 B8     ................
00000040 - E0 CC 0D B8

after that wait a few seconds and the drive is there.

Regards

[ljwrocker]

i tried that and this is what comes up:
and is there any way to see the drive in windows?, i dnt think i saw it in linux bt ill give it another go
usb rocker v0.001a
vendor : Newsmy Mp4Player 1.00a
device is unloaded

[AleMaxx]

Hello ljwrocker,
could you please paste here what "dmesg | tail" says after you plugin the device and after you executed the tool? Notably the portions that are relevant to your player (try without tail if something is missing).
You can try to "port" the code to Windows, at the bottom of the "BulkOnly.c" from the RK27 SDK are the relevant information i.e.:

if (pCbwCb->cbLun == 0XE0)

    {
        [...]
        else if (pCbwCb->LBA == 0XFFFFFFFE)    //SWITCH ROCK USB

        {

            if (pCbwCb->cbLen == 0)
        [...]
        else if (pCbwCb->LBA == 0XFFFFFFFC)    //080524,huangsl , SWITCH TO OPEN SYSTEMDISK

        {

            if (pCbwCb->cbLen == 0)
        [...]

These are all SCSI Read12 commands, you may have a look at SourceForge.net Repository - [s1mp3] Index of /trunk/rockchip/rkfwx which I think simulates SCSI commands by USB bulk transfers. Basically the Rockchip player presents itself as a mass storage device and there is an USB standard that describes this (USB.org - Approved Device Class Document Download). So under windows get libusb (libusb-win32.sourceforge.net) and get it working ;-).
Anyway, maybe issuing a "SWITCH ROCK USB" command before the "SWITCH TO OPEN SYSTEMDISK" will solve your problem.

Regards

[ljwrocker]

i cant get the exact code but one thing i noticed after running the tool i got this message in dmesg :

usb 1-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2

i try that command but nothing responds, and after goggling it i found its a common unsolved problem with many pmp players

heres what TestLibUsb says about the player

DLL version: 0.1.12.2
Driver version: -1.-1.-1.-1

bus/device idVendor/idProduct
bus-0/\\.\libusb0-0001--0x071b-0x3203 071B/3203
- Manufacturer : RockChip
- Product : ROCK MP3
- Serial Number: USBV1.00
wTotalLength: 39
bNumInterfaces: 1
bConfigurationValue: 1
iConfiguration: 0
bmAttributes: c0h
MaxPower: 50
bInterfaceNumber: 0
bAlternateSetting: 0
bNumEndpoints: 3
bInterfaceClass: 8
bInterfaceSubClass: 6
bInterfaceProtocol: 80
iInterface: 0
bEndpointAddress: 01h
bmAttributes: 02h
wMaxPacketSize: 512
bInterval: 0
bRefresh: 0
bSynchAddress: 0
bEndpointAddress: 82h
bmAttributes: 02h
wMaxPacketSize: 512
bInterval: 0
bRefresh: 0
bSynchAddress: 0
bEndpointAddress: 83h
bmAttributes: 03h
wMaxPacketSize: 32
bInterval: 11
bRefresh: 0
bSynchAddress: 0

anyway is there anything you can help me from that?
im not quite a linux person as i have been doing most of my work through
windows.