My Gp2x Stopped Reading Sd Cards!


MaxSteiner

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Joined
Nov 19, 2008
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168
Last night I was working through the GP2x wiki, adding lots of hombrew goodness to an SD card before going to bed.
Played a couple of games, had the batteries go flat on me and called it a night.

And for some reason, when I woke up and turned the machine on I find its returned to the default skin (And lost the one I was using), and won't read any of the SD cards its been running on since I bought it! :(

I've tried obvious things like swapping the batteries, restarting, etc etc, I've checked the cards on my PC and they still show up as working fine.
I'm just about to try a freshly formatted card, but i'm a bit perplexed as to why it was working fine last night, but not today!
The only thing which I've notticed is one of my brand new rechargeables is now completly dead to the GP2X, don't even get the colourful rainbow lines of flatness when I try and turn it on with that in.

I've done the traditional google search, and the only answer I've seen was to do with upgrading the firmware.... which might be a bit difficult since I don't have the cable for the GP2X... And I've heard so many tales of terror that im hesitant to upgrade/downgrade from something which was working the other day.

I do have a spare usb key sitting round, so I suppose I might be able to access something from that via the cradle....

Anyone have any idea what the hell I've managed to do to it?
Even better, does anyone have any idea how to fix it?

(Sorry for the garbled message, not quite at the height of my eloquance yet)
 
Argh, Im on 3.00 so I'm really not ready to risk downgrading the firmware :(, it wont read the third card I've stuck in there either.... why does all this shit have to happen on my days off>!?!?!?!
 
Shouldn't think it would be the firmware, because it would either work or not work (i.e. not even boot). You could use STerm (or whatever it's called now ... Termula2x?) to type "dmesg" and see if anything happens before and after inserting a card.

I imagine it's more likely that, if the only thing you can't access is SD cards, the SD card slot might be dirty - a small cotton bud dipped in cleaning alcohol and gently cleaning the inside of it may help (take the batteries out / turn the power off first). Years of gunk can easily build up on these contacts, especially if you tend to take the SD card out when you store it.

The batteries thing doesn't sound good but I would run a multimeter in "dc volts" mode across that battery first to see if it is in fact dead. Anything less than 1.0V is probably dead - some batteries run at 1.2v, though.

I don't think it can be card corruption (other cards work), or batteries (other batteries work, GP2X operates) and I doubt it's firmware (it turns on, it boots, can it run games from the NAND?).
 
Well, sadly, my GP2x didn't come with any of the built in games (secound hand model, Im assuming its a value pack model though on account of the firmware and cradle though)....

Can't seem to find the help videos which were on it originally... so theres nothing I can test with...
All the menu's seem to work alright though they are abit slower than I remember.

I'm actually clutching at straws here...




I
 
East Sussex, England :D

I'm kinda considering Flashing to Open2x Dr4.... but reflashing the firmware seems a little desperete.

Ok, new problem of the SD cards taking a fricken age to show up in the PC's SD reader (And they take ages anyway).... Gonna try formatting one of the cards when the damn thing finally lets me save all the files to a folder.

(Also just notticed that theres black lines through all of my icons on the menu as well, but I think thats just a standard feature of 3.0)

===> Damn, ok just double checked, the help videos definatly seem to be gone from the ROM.... but I recall sitting through them all when I got it a couple of months ago.

====> Strangely though it still makes the sega start up noise which i'm guessing is a custom start up...
 
Ok, just reformated an SD card.... and it still isn't picking up a damn thing :(
3 hours and no discernable progress has kinda left me bummed out...
And I don't think my girlfriend is going to accept me canceling our date to try and sort this... Women can be so unreasonable! lol.

All I can think of now is seeing if it will pick up external usb storage...
otherwise its drastic stuff like opening it up and checking the connections (Concievably it might be a loose wire I suppose), or changing the firmware (Which I doubt will do anything either but at least it would be a fresh start...)

I could always try hoping it will magically go back to the way it was before I went to sleep :D
Shame the GP2X is so small, otherwise I'd try my standard tech repair method and slap it around a bit...
 
I don't think the problem is the firmware.. (despite how bad 3.0 sucks).

If it were my unit, I'd do the following (you've probably already tried some of these)

1.) Try using a DC adapter (I already have one so that's easy)

2.) Clean SD's contacts with rubbing alcohol. Leave them wetted and insert the the SD into the unit several times, then blow out with air. Visually inspect SD slot for debris with flashlight.

3.)Try several different SD cards

4.) Try a new SD card reader to format and write to the SDs (if you haven't mentioned trying that already). I recently had my cheapo dealextreme SDHC-compatible one start flaking out on me and had to revert back to another older non-SDHC one.

5.) Try wiping the first 1K of the SD it under Linux (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcsd/disc0 count=1K) and repartitioning/formatting FAT32

6.) Open the unit and visually inspect the SD socket. I'd go over each lead from the socket with a soldering gun and a tiny bit of fresh solder.
 
Ok, still no joy on this (Although I haven't been devoting quite as much time as I'd like... hopefully I can get something meaningful today before Im forced out of the house lol), but when researching the 3.00 firmware I found the comments on the archive page to be very similar to the problems I'm having (I.E can't access anything on the NAND, won't read SD cards etc)....

http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,42,2027

... As you can tell Im still clutching at straws, but its nice to see that I'm not the only person this has happened too and its even nicer to see that people managed to fix it in the end (probably wont be so nice when I realise none of this will help me though :D)
 
That post is about people who flashed a new firmware which was "sucked" off a Value pack GP2X onto their non-Value pack GP2X's. It's also quite normal to get several people moan that a firmware has "broken" their machines because they didn't have it plugged into AC, or used a dodgy SD card, didn't check the download was complete, or (in some cases) the NAND in the GP2X had too many sectors marked as dirty and needed cleaning (there's a NAND flash util for that somewhere but you don't really want to play with it because the NAND contains your only way of booting from anything and if you bugger it up, only a specialist cable/hardware will get it back).

Have you flashed a new firmware lately? If not, I'd doubt this was your problem.

What, exactly, have you tried or not tried? I wouldn't suggest flashing your firmware further until you've eliminated other causes because if the SD reader or NAND is faulty, you stand a good chance of bricking the thing.
 
So far I've tried using 3 different SD cards (A Toshiba 1 GB, the one which came my GP2x and an 8mb one I found sitting around), all formatted in both FAT16 and 32 formats.
I've tried cleaning the connections, booting from battery and power supply, leaving it for rediculous ammounts of time, wobbling the card a bit, and booting with start and select held down (which should prevent autoruns from working if I've read that correctly).
Today I'm going to be trying to pick up a USB storage device plugged into the cradle (hopefully I'll find the time to open it up and look at the connections on the reader too).

I know some kinda NAND error is far less likely than a loose piece of wire or something equally stupid, and I know that all Im likely to do is corrupt a bunch of sectors, but I'm really at a loss as to where the missing themes and help videos have gotten too (And why the menu has the black blocks flashing over the selected icon, never used to do that either), and why it isn't detecting any files at all.

Just seems to me that if it isn't a hardware problem, I might have corrupted the 101files (Or whatever the 3.0 equivlent is), so just reflashing that segmant of the OS could concievably work without causing too many problems.
If it will read files of a USB key in the cradle I might still be able to get some use out of it, but otherwise the device is kinda useless....
I suppose it might be wiser to see if theres any GP2x repairers still plying their trade near me though :D
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Ok, got it sorted!
After working through all I could think off I decided to try Open2x, since at the very least it would confirm the SD card was working.
Long and the short of it is though, reflashing seemed to fix everything.
Got very worried when all I would get was a rainbow screen but it turned out it was just cause I wasn't powering the cradle lol.
(Still kinda atta loss as to what I did in the first place though... all I can think is the bad power down)

Anyway, just wanna say thanks for the support and help everyone who replied, stopped me panicking too much :D
 
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