Cowon iAudio X5L CF Mod

[razorblader]

Originally Posted by lestatar

@razorblader: Indeed! Excellent work, congrats on the frontpage and thanks for sharing your pro tips.

You're welcome and thanks a lot for your kind words.

[CrowdAds]

[Mauro]

Hello Razorblader,
Since you recorded a 13mbs read speed, can you translate this figure to some real world usage. Firstly When the player is first switched on, is it fast(almost instantaneous) and secondly what about jumping speed from track to track?

Thanks

[razorblader]

Originally Posted by Mauro

Hello Razorblader,
Since you recorded a 13mbs read speed, can you translate this figure to some real world usage. Firstly When the player is first switched on, is it fast(almost instantaneous) and secondly what about jumping speed from track to track?

Thanks

Boot-up time ís around 5 seconds for the OF, about the same for Rockbox.

Switching tracks is nearly instantaneous with flac and mp3.

My second X5 which still has its original 30 GB HDD takes about 11 secs for the OF boot-up and around 9 secs for Rockbox.

[Mauro]

Originally Posted by razorblader

Boot-up time ís around 5 seconds for the OF, about the same for Rockbox.

Switching tracks is nearly instantaneous with flac and mp3.

My second X5 which still has its original 30 GB HDD takes about 11 secs for the OF boot-up and around 9 secs for Rockbox.

Thanks very much for the precise figures as I am debating between this mod or the compact flash option. I like the idea of having the option of having the original FW and Rockbox together. There is also the benefit that the SD card option is also quite cheaper(at Amazon.com).
Another point to make is that in my opinion Cowon might upgrade the J3 this year with 64Gb of interval memory and still offer the SD card slot to add further memory, and this SD card would be used for that purpose.

[razorblader]

You're welcome Mauro.

Costs and flexibility (and proof of feasability ;-) drove me to try the SD-card mod. I have a number of other devices that I can pop the SDXC card in if I should decide to decommission the X5 but wouldn't have any other use for a CF-card which also still costs more at this time.

Please be advised that this card won't work with the J3 as it has a microSDHC slot.

[Mauro]

Originally Posted by razorblader

You're welcome Mauro.

.....Please be advised that this card won't work with the J3 as it has a microSDHC slot.

Yes you're absolutely correct. Small error on my part, it's been a while since I've read a review on the J3. Still pondering my next move though.....

[Mr. Popo]

could you do this with SD cards?

[Mauro]

Originally Posted by Mr. Popo

could you do this with SD cards?

This is a SD card mod.

[Buzzy]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the forum and have owned an X5L 30 gb pretty much since they came out. I've had problems with the original HDD and thought the device was a brick until coming across this thread. I'd like to thank the contributors for their effort and posting it here. It's given me the confidence to tinker with the old X5L. To keep it short, here is what I did:

1) replaced the HDD with the components mentioned by Razorblader 3-6-11
(50 pin to CF adapter, CF to SD adapter, 64 GB transcend SDXC)

2) before assembling X5L I formatted the SDXC to FAT32 on 6,2 macbookpro using SD card slot on side of computer and 'disk utility'

3) Loaded original firmware using subpack, again using MBP

To my surprise it worked right out of the gate. All the original functions I've tried work as usual including clock, skip, BBE, jet effect, equalizer, scrubbing. In fact, I'm currently listening to UM flacs while I type this up. I do not have nearly the expertise as many of the posters and was ever so happy to avoid adjusting code lines in the master boot record and such. No offense to Razorblader, that you can figure this out is simply amazing to me.

I have noticed some things. First, the boot time is very quick, on the order of only a few seconds. Second, the device image bounces back on the computer's desktop very quickly after trashing it. The only way I can get it off is to unmount it with 'disk utility' and then trash it. Third, and a little annoying, it'll sometimes skip around a little in the songs. It does this seemingly randomly. In other words, not at the same part of the song each time it happens. I've noticed that the battery level indicator quickly jumps from nearly full to nearly empty during these episodes and eventually settles back to the actual charge level. Overall, I am very happy with the time and financial investment for this project. Not to mention the old X5L has new life.

Well, that's my story. Any comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[IronFly]

tested the same thing with only CF but i'm still having HDD error message.

MBRwiz tell me that partition is ok "0C-FAT32X".

the only difference is that i use "/part=1" i have an "error 21 partition don't exist".
if i use "/part=0" it works but still HDD error.

EDIT: found solution, need MBRwizard 3.0

[IronFly]

i'm going crazy!

maybe you have found a very lucky HW combination but even making with MBRwizard the CF looks the same as HD, X5 still give me "HDD error".

[razorblader]

Might be too obvious but could it be that you got the IDE/CF adapter connected the wrong way? It's possible to connect it 'upside-down' and this will give you the HDD error. Check also for correct pin alignment, with some adapters you have to clip the plastic lugs on both sides.

[IronFly]

i have the same CF adapter as DFKT and rockbox is running, so i think is connected in the right way.

CF is set as fixed drive as original HDD.

EDIT: on iaudiophile someone stated that with a "Compact Flash Kingston 32GB 133x ELITE PRO FAT32" worked straight away with the CF adapter; the only difference i noticed is some kind of "autosleep" support function.

[razorblader]

Before I settled with the components I recommended for my mod I tried the same mod with a CF/IDE adapter that looks identical to the one DFKT used (mine has a led on the right side though) and a cheaper SD/CF adapter and that combination also works. It was a bit wonky though depending on how far you would insert the SDXC card, meaning pushing it all the way in caused a unreliable connection, pulling the SD card out a little (so it was flush with the adapter) alleviated the problem.

I settled for the CF/IDE in my description because it's built like a HDD and is therefore easier to work with but functionality-wise it doesn't make a real difference, the SD/CF adapter is the one that makes a bigger difference as there are some that support the proper IDE modes and others don' but I think there is enough detail in my description of the mod to choose the correct one.

Make sure you have the latest version of the Cowon X5 FW and you got the dual-boot working correctly with the original HDD. I'm using the 'older' bootloader as the more recent one doesn't support dual-boot if I'm not mistaken. DFKT compiled one that should work also but I haven't tried that one and can't comment on it.

[geokite]

Originally Posted by razorblader

After doing some research into SDHC/SDXC compatibility I realized that current SDXC cards are glorified SDHC cards with capacities higher than 32 GB and ...

If this is true for current SDXC cards, is there any reason to think it will not be true for future higher capacity SDXC cards?

Thanks for your work on this. I bought the MBRwizard program and a CF-sd card adapter to future proof my iriver H120.

Steve

[dfkt]

Most/all(?) current SDXC cards still adhere to the SD 3.0 (UHS-I) standard specifications, while upcoming ones will be 4.0 (UHS-II) - which likely won't be compatible any more, even if they're formatted to FAT32.

[razorblader]

Originally Posted by dfkt

Most/all(?) current SDXC cards still adhere to the SD 3.0 (UHS-I) standard specifications, while upcoming ones will be 4.0 (UHS-II) - which likely won't be compatible any more, even if they're formatted to FAT32.

Correct. We'll see how fast they'll move to the 4.0 standard as the current generation of SDXC cards is specified to (theoretically) go up to 2 TB of capacity.

[bbtiger]

Originally Posted by razorblader

Hi fabarati, good to know there are still other X5 connaisseurs out there.

....
After doing some research into SDHC/SDXC compatibility I realized that current SDXC cards are glorified SDHC cards with capacities higher than 32 GB and a few people on various forums theorized that it shouldn't be a problem to format an SDXC card with FAT32 instead of exFAT which is standard with SDXC cards. Here is where the trouble starts...

Windows won't format your SDXC card with FAT32, nor will the Panasonic formatter tool, both 'recognize' the card as SDXC and offer the possibility to format it with exFAT or NTFS.

You got 3 easy choices:

1. Format the card on a Linux box.

2. Use guiformat, a FAT32 format tool with a GUI under Windows.

Find it here:
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/ind...at32format.htm

Set allocation unit size to 32768 and do a quick format.

3. Use this command line tool under Windows:

http://www1.mager.org/mkdosfs/

It's the mkdosfs application which someone ported to Windows. The usage is explained in the link I posted, it contains the dl-link as well.

Command to format the card:

mkdosfs -v -F 32 -n name X:

where X: stands for the respective drive letter and 'name' represents the volume label that you choose for the drive.

I'm sure there are other tools which might work but that's what I used. I recommend to use guiformat.

After you format the card you can copy files to it and all looks dandy as long as you use it under Windows. I then proceeded to test the card with my Cowon D2+ and long story short it wouldn't recognize the card.

Copied the necessary files for the X5 on it and tried it with the adapters in my X5L, again, no luck.
After a bit more testing I realized that there had to be something in the MBR of the card that made it impossible for the Cowon players to recognize/use it.

Looking for a tool to be able to analyze and edit the MBR I found MBRWizard which works great. It allows you to backup the MBR of (removable) cards/drives, you can restore it and you can view and edit the information as well.

Find it here:
http://firesage.com/doload.php?f=mbrwiz&n=4&z=1

Upon analysis of the MBR data of the card I realized what the problem was. The MBR of a drive contains a partition 'type' entry which basically describes which filesystems are supported on the medium and in the case of the SDXC card that entry reads 07-NTFS indicating NTFS and exFAT compatibility. So simply re-formating the card with FAT32 doesn't do the trick alone, you also have to change this entry to 0C-FAT32X with the MBRWizard command line tool. Info on the usage of MBRWizard can be found here:

http://mbrwizard.com/examples.php

To get a list of all connected drives run this command in MBRWiz:

MBRWiz /list

This will give you a nice overview of all drives with all the relevant information. Identify the disk # of the card and change the partition type with the following command:

MBRWiz /disk=n /part=1 /type=CH

where n stands for the disk number you identified with the list command.

After the partition type entry change the D2+ had no problem recognizing the card and using it and the X5 boots the original FW as well as Rockbox.

Average sequential read and write speed is around 13MB/s with the card in the X5. Copying a folder with 2.68 GB took about 4 minutes.

Mission accomplished.

razorblader,
I first used fat32formatter from http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/ to format my 64GB microSDXC card (I also used my Samsung Captivate to format the same card) and tested the card in my Acer A500, Clip Zips. So far it seems to work without a hitch.