Flasher won't work - with old/new firmware !??

[Clemenseken]

Hi!
I did look up a lot of threads/posts about why the Flasher 1.2 might NOT run:
I emptied my SD card, refomatted it, threw out all books from the reader, made shure all Flasher files are in root. I even posted a similar question on the thread "Sony Reader PRS-500 Universal Flasher" two days ago (no reply so far).

BUT:
I allways get the following message when running "Run Script ... 5: make a new image":

"Failure while executing script. Check make_fs.log"

It stops immediately. (#3: run script.sh says: "Script finished" but I don't see any results on my screen?!?)

What goes wrong, what could I do, why can't I get those wonderful hacks onto my PRS500 ???

Anybody out there have any further ideas?!? I'd gladly give a lot of kharma to you...

Clemens

(p.s.: I tried with the original firmware 1.0.0.xxx and the updated 1.0.3.7xxx. No difference there...)

[JSWolf]

Do you have enough free space on the SD card?

[NatCh]

Dumb question alert: Which model Sony Reader do you have? The flasher doesn't work on the 505, is the reason I ask.

[BenG]

It also makes a difference if you recently formatted the card whether you chose FAT or FAT32. I can't remember which it should be though.

[JSWolf]

FAT I think. The SD card I am using is one that I never reformatted. Just using as is.

[Clemenseken]

Hi!

I have the old PRS500 model. There is plenty of space on my card (>100MB).
The card is shown to be formatted as FAT12. I first tried it as is, then reformatted the card - no difference.

I today downloaded the Flasher 1.2 once more and put it on the card. There I unzipped it, then moved the folder's contents to root.
No success.

I looked into contents of the PRS500 (with the command line PRS500lib) and saw that the script(s) did copy "mcopy" the first time I run the Flasher.
If I run it again there is an error message stating difficulties to copy "mcopy" to /tmp.
If I manually remove mcopy from /tmp (PRS500 rm path/mcopy) it will run exactly once more - but allways stops with "Failure to run script"...

There was NEVER written a "make_fs.log".

The only unusual thing I might mention is that I work on an Apple iBook.
That should not effect internals on the eReader, though, should it?

EDIT: Maybe someone could send me a "manual" way to do only the most necessary steps by hand from a terminal window? I am no programmer but know the basics quite well.

Thanks !!!

[igorsk]

You need to have enough space in the main data partition, not on the card.
Try to reset the reader and run the flasher again.
Try to apply the latest firmware update (has to be done from Windows) and then use the flasher.
You can't do it all manually from commandline, since part of the process has to run on the Reader itself.

[Clemenseken]

Oh, hi igorsk!

I checked all internal values:

prs500 info
Device name: Sony Reader
Device version: PRS-500/U //Does "/U" mean anything special?
Software version: 1.0.03.07170
Mime type: application/x-bbeb-book

prs500 df
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use%
Memory 91M 2M 89M 2%
Stick 0 0 0 0%
Card 243M 94M 148M 38%

prs500 ls -l -h // after I tried #5 in your Flasher
-rw-rw-rw- 49 2006-01-01 01:04 script.log
-rw-rw-rw- 2 2006-01-01 01:04 cardroot
-rw-rw-rw- 3.0K 2007-03-05 15:30 libfskLoad.so
-rw-rw-rw- 3.1K 2007-05-17 21:51 script.sh
-rw-rw-rw- 401.2K 2007-04-28 15:58 mcopy

script.log says:
mode of `/tmp/mcopy' changed to 0755 (rwxr-xr-x)

Do you get any idea what#s wrong ?!?

[igorsk]

Try to add the following in the beginning of make_opt.sh (e.g. before the first echo)
$mkdir /Data/tmp

[Clemenseken]

I tried adding your line.
But it doesn't seem to make any difference.
Hmmmm.

One more thing came to my mind:
When "#5" had not worked the first time (4 days ago) I tried just for fun "#7".
The screen went to "firmware update incomplete" etc. - without a new version on the SD card (stupid, wasn't I).

THEN I had to visit my brother to do the normal firmware update (via Connect) on his PC.
The updater said "update finished - you may safely turn connection off" or similar.
But the eReader kept on showing "firmware update running".
I had to do several resets to get it running finally!!!
Maybe something got turned up in these processes?

[Clemenseken]

... but I don't really expect an answer from you for my very individual problem with your great Flasher... !!!

You certainly have more important things to do!
I let prs500.py list the contents of my eReader and zipped it into the attached file.

If you are curious you might have a look into this. I apologize for my question/request - and am afraid there is nothing to find here.

It might come out in the end that my SD card is faulty or something (to my shame...).


(EDIT: I will leave for Xmas holidays tomorrow for about 6 days.)

[Clemenseken]

... just found out that igorsk's Flasher would not work on my prs500 because:

my unzip application changed line breaks from UNIX to macintosh style.

I changed preferences accordingly: Now the flasher works allright!

(I had found out about wrong line breaks when I finally got obelix' Sudoku to run - after saving Sudokus template files as UNIX text.
Yesterday I remembered my difficulties with flasher...)