NEVER BIN A JOGGLER

[roobarb!]

Every now and again, somebody posts that their Joggler isn't working and they ponder whether they should chuck it out.

NEVER BIN A JOGGLER

The likelihood is that your Joggler can be brought back to working order pretty easily.

If you don't have the time or skills to repair it yourself and you still consider getting rid of it, many people on this forum would happily take it off your hands, regardless of its condition.

NEVER BIN A JOGGLER

Pop it on the marketplace and if it's genuinely dead, why not give it away? You were only going to discard it anyway.

There will come a time when this hardware will not be so easy to find as it is today. Every broken Joggler has parts that can be used to salvage many others and it would be irresponsible (not to mention bad for the environment) to let them go to waste.

If you're still considering putting one in the bin, send me a message and I'll see if I can cover your postage costs of getting it to me.

So, in conclusion:

NEVER BIN A JOGGLER

[jim_lewis1]

Well said. Although on first reading I did think, never bin a joggler before, but I am now!

[gegs]

In keeping with the spirit of this thread, I've just bought 3 ex-betting shop Jogglers on ebay that the seller couldn't reflash. Wish me luck!

[roobarb!]

In keeping with the spirit of this thread, I've just bought 3 ex-betting shop Jogglers on ebay that the seller couldn't reflash. Wish me luck!

Good luck! In the face of failure, chuck a USB memory stick in there.

[gegs]

@roobarb - I hoped to run an Android Joggler and one of BuZz's linux distros from stick, but also use one as a PnPIII device. I'm hoping to get one reflashed but if I can't, it'll make a nice SqpOS bedside alarm clock/radio. It cost me just over £32 including postage for all three; bargain of the century.

[jim_lewis1]

I have a joggler that does nothing now apart from very slightly illuminate the screen. It won't boot into pnpiii on an external udb stick or run the reflash tool. What are my next steps to resurrect it? Do I need a donor working joggler and a uefi chip transplant?
Obviously I don't want to bork a working joggler. Is there something else to try first?

[jim_lewis1]

Actually, having now powered it on and of a few times it does actually show an open peak logo and dimly lights the screen. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be trying to boot from USB though. If I had a keyboard attached is there something I can try?

[pete]

I have seen the dim backlight or all white screen sometimes with Joggler's that haven't been turned on in a few days. That and I had one here that would work 24/7 for long periods of time then screen would freeze and NIC port would start to beacon network stuff. The OpenPeak power supply finally gave up and now thinking that was my issue with this one Joggler. That is the first time I have seen an Openpeak 5VDC transformer give up.

Try first a new power supply to see if it'll provide enough power to the O2 Joggler to boot.

Then try the EFI blind keyboard presses and entry stuff to see if you can get it to boot to the USB stick.

Re: Bricked joggler - any ideas?

Baking should be the last thing you should do. You could damage the motherboard very easily with baking.

BTW this is very low on the WAF (using oven to bake electronics).

Try the blind typing thing with a bootable USB stick.

If you get it to boot then reformat the MMC a couple of times and rewrite the EFI boot partition to see if you can get it to boot from a USB stick.

Only try the boot from a directly plugged in USB stick either inside or on the side and no USB hub. Plug the USB keyboard / mouse combo into the second USB port (remove the USB wireless card for the time being).

Blind typing procedure:

Recovering an unbootable Joggler

1 - Before you do any of this, it is essential that you have a working usbstick with an efi partition and a working OS with all drivers.

2 - If something you do leaves the Joggler in a non-booting state (i.e. stuck on O2/OpenPeak screen) take the following steps:
A - Don't Panic
B - Attach keyboard and known good usb stick, and apply power to the Joggler
C - Press escape frantically (oh yes just like the good ol' days)
D - Once the num-lock key has lit, press escape a few more times. The process has worked if the numlock/caps lock key switches on and off when you press the appropriate key.
E - type the following: fs1:boot and press enter. You are typing blind thanks to the jogglers boot screen.
F - If it doesn't boot the USB stick repeat the whole process.
G - It it doesn't work repeat the whole process but type fs0:boot and press enter

3 - Once booting into Ubuntu delete the MMC parition, create one EFI boot partition (DD or just copy it with GParted).

4 - Test the booting to USB with the newly written EFI boot partition.

[jim_lewis1]

Thanks Pete. I am sort of making progress. I am trying to 'boot' using a reflash USB. I have a keyboard that now allows me to switch num lock on/off. But typing fs0:boot (no spaces?) Or fs1:boot isn't apparently doing much although at one point I saw some messages flick past, just legible on the top line.
I'm not sure if I could replicate that behaviour, or what it meant. I think it was just complaining.

[jim_lewis1]

OK, really not sure what/why this happened. With reflash USB in I managed to enter fs0:boot which actually brought up original open peak OS. At this point I'm not sure what to do. Recycling power may prevent boot again. I'd actually like to reflash to pnpiii I think.

[pete]

Could be a bad boot EFI boot rom or just a bit scrambled. You could try two things.

One is to replace it doing a hot swap and write or even maybe just a rewrite to the boot flash rom.

To date I have had one (out of a buch) bad ROM. Here I could tell cuz I could never write the boot code bin and it would stall.

Do you have an extra O2 sitting around for parts use. The boot room socket is on the other side of the motherboard facing the back of the O2 Joggler.

The reflash doesn't write a new boot bin to the ROM.

It does check and rewrite to the 1Gb MMC drive including the first EFI boot partition.

Have you ever tried to rewrite the boot rom?

It is easy.

1 - Best / easiest to do via SSH.

2 - SSH to O2

3 - copy bin to USB stick

4 - cd via ssh to USB stick with efi boot rom image

2 - modprobe fh

3 - dd if=/mnt/efi.img of=/dev/fh bs=1024

I can post a boot rom image if you want?

[jim_lewis1]

Omfg! This time fs0:boot made it start the reflash operation (I think!).
Reflash underway.

[jim_lewis1]

OK, our posts crossed. So, you think even after a reflash, the thing might not boot as it won't know what to boot from?

[jim_lewis1]

OK, so now I can boot into reflash USB but obviously there's no point as that has already run. Trying to boot into internal memory (which should have been flashed now) just hangs.
I'm making another external image to boot into. Although I wonder why I can't boot to internal. It did work once prior to the reflash.

[pete]

Good News Jim!

I am only guessing here because the 1 GB MMC where the software sits does get worn out after many read writes. This is where you would substitute booting the OS from a USB stick cuz the MMC is soldered on.

The 1 Mb boot ROM is read only but also can get worn out over time. The boot ROM is easy to replace as it is a socketed chip.

The reflash will check out the MMC, fix it and write a new image to it. It should work fine after this. If not then use the USB stick to boot from. Note that the original O2 Joggler OS doesn't exist in a bootable stick form.

You would utilize an alternative OS here. (IE: Squeeze or BuZz's Ubuntu build).

[jim_lewis1]

OK, I managed to reflash it again. This time it automatically booted into the internal image. I will now reflash to sqpos I think.

[pete]

Well then you are up and running now! Good news.

Is this the first time the O2 Joggler got borked?

You should be OK. I would consider moving over to just booting from a USB stick maybe eh?

[jim_lewis1]

I can't remember the history of this one. I think it was in regular use, then found hung one day and wouldn't recover. Now it's booting itself into it's internal image again OK and running sqpos. I'll monitor it. It has no WiFi card, so even if it needs an external image it can be physically internal to the unit.

[jim_lewis1]

Thank you Pete for the tip regarding how to force boot using the keyboard. That was critical to recovering this joggler.

[pete]

It is not an issue Jim. Like this Joggler stuff and been playing with it a while now.

I am currently using a Joggler Squeezeplayers for my zoned and subzoned audio stuff.

Jogglers are great little devices made well ahead of their time.

Today have three Jogglers running in the master bedroom. IE: one on each night stand and one in the media cabinet.