Linuxphile.org

I recently purchased a broken Gigabeat S60 from Ebay. It was noted on the seller's page that the Gigabeat would boot, but with an error message. I didn't know what I was actually going to receive but had hopes that once the great folks at Rockbox ported their software to the S series Gigabeat I would be able to get the MP3 player working.

When I received the broken Gigabeat I promptly opened the case and discovered the problem with it to be a loose hard drive cable. This is easy enough to fix: simply reinsert the cable properly and boot. Those were my initial thoughts. Unfortunately the loose cable and multiple boot attempts with the cable loose corrupted the firmware on the Gigabeat.

I called Toshiba hoping I could get a disc with a firmware updating utility. They informed me I could send them the Gigabeat and they could fix it for roughly $130 dollars. I had only paid $100 for the device to begin with so I didn't think it was truly worth $130 for Toshiba to fix. I would just wait for the Rockbox hack. In meantime I bought a brand new S60 and have been enjoying it since.

I wandered over to the Wiki for the S series at http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/GigabeatSInfo and read great news concerning my old S series. Toshiba had released a firmware update in Japan for the Toshiba V which, similar to the S series, also runs Windows Mobile. One of the brilliant developers for Rockbox discovered that by changing one of the hex bits in this firmware update you could also update an S series.

In addition to this information a link was provided that packages and runs the firmware update. I promptly downloaded from the link provided, http://rapidshare.com/files/25382872/GigabeatSRecover.rar.html. Within minutes after the completion of the download my old broken S series Gigabeat was again booting successfully with Windows Mobile.

I am now just awaiting the complete Rockbox port, but now in the meantime, I can make use of the $100 device purchased from Ebay!

Thanks Rockbox team!!!