f1rick

I found some information and links to datasheets here

The goal I believe is to have the opensource firmware Rockbox loaded onto the walkman. This should allow a wide range of codecs to then be played back and music can just be dragged and dropped onto the HD5 with file explorer. It would then be compatible with both Linux and Mac.

Does the service manual contain enough information? Seems to be quite extensive and complicated, not that I know anything about firmware and the like! Good luck!

Finally this has come to an end, but do I have a fixed HD5H. Absolutely not! A couple of weeks ago after chasing up the support supervisor I was given an extension to the warranty while they had my walkman fixed with the 30GB hard drive. After not hearing anything for two weeks, I gave them a call this afternoon. The person I spoke to could not be more helpful and apologised for all the trouble. But it seems no matter how hard they try, they cannot get the place that they send the walkmans to, to fix it with a 30GB drive!! She said it had been sent back and forth several times and each time had not been repaired. So I've been given a refund on the unit and been told the issue is being investigated. So if your HD5H is in need of a hard drive repair in the UK, be afraid, very afraid!! .

Only one problem, if you copy albums over in the group view they are just added to the end of the list and not kept in alphabetical order by artist. Probably not such a problem with flash players, but could be with a long list on the HDD players. So when copying albums over, might be best to stay using the album, by artist view. Try right clicking and save target as, it will probably say index.php or something. Just rename what it saves to the xml file name. The error is the web browser trying to load the xml file. edit: You beat me to it!!

THat's great! I can confirm it works on my HD5H!! Well Done

I CANNOT believe this!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I got through the post an invoice from Sony charging me for £17.63. "Our engineers have been unable to detect a fault with your product. All functions have been checked and tested and are working to specification" No it's not, they fitted a 20GB hard drive. That's NOT specification.

Yes, it's the european version , connects up to the UK connect store. Playing with it right now, Artist link is nice! Everything seems quicker to me. Oh why didn't Sony offer such firmware updates for us HDx owners. Oh well, such is progress .

Had a look at the 3.4 links/4.0 links and came up with this. And it works!!! Seems SonyUK cannot even put the energy in to update their website . http://dl1.aii.co.jp/contents/connect/_dat...geInstaller.exe

I don't think that's typical , hard drive failure doesn't seem a very common reported issue on these forums at least. I'm hoping Sony just had a bad batch of 30GB hard drives.

Oasis: Familiar to Millions 1. ****in' in the Bushes 2. Go Let It Out 3. Who Feels Love? 4. Supersonic 5. Shakermaker 6. Acquiesce 7. Step Out 8. Gas Panic! 9. Roll With It 10. Stand by Me 11. Wonderwall 12. Cigarettes and Alcohol 13. Don't Look Back in Anger 14. Live Forever 15. Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) 16. Champagne Supernova 17. Rock 'N' Roll Star 18. Helter Skelter Isn't gapless great for live albums . One I was at

Both have lasted about 8-10 months before failure.

This all starts a couple of months ago when one of my NWHD5H's stops working, just spinning circles almost certainly indicating a failed hard drive. I returned this to Sony Central Service in the UK after a couple of weeks I receive it back. Turn it on and it works, look at the repair note and they have replaced the hard drive. I plug it in to copy my music back over and notice it is now only 20GB!!!! How incompetent can you get, not only my letter but the copy of the receipt and also the part number on the hard drive should indicate this is a 30GB special edition model. Even the black/silver style should indicate this. But okay, human error happens. I doubt they get many 30gb to repair being a special edition so I gave them the benefit of doubt and returned it again for repair to have the hard drive changed back to 30gb. Several weeks later I get back my 30gb Walkman, all fine this time. Now my 2nd HD5H suffers the same failure, so again I post it back. This time I make sure it's not going to be wrongly fitted with a 20GB hard drive. I stick a label on the screen saying 30GB HD5H. I write 30GB HD5H in the letter at twice the size of everything else in bold. I write a paragraph to explain just this very point. After they received the unit and I got the receipt through the post, I phone Sony service to make sure it was booked in as a 30GB HD5H. Only to find out it was NOT!!!!! So they update their computer and tell me they will inform their engineers. The weeks pass.... In the post I receive back a 20GB HD5H!!! HOW INCOMPETENT CAN YOU GET!!!!! THIS IS JUST RIDICULOUS!!!! Now I'm off to post it back to be ??upgraded?? back to a 30GB Walkman. Has anyone with a special edition have the same situation happen? I still cannot believe this. f1rick

I've just seen this problem. Here is a fix. Navigate to: C:\Program Files\Sony\SonicStage right click on "Omgjbox.exe" and select properties. Click on compatibility and select disable visual themes. No more problems

The walkmans that support playlists are the HD5 onwards. The HD1,2,3 and flash players up to the 505 to my knowledge just copied over duplicates of the songs and made a new album. This was the main reason I had not bought a walkman, until the HD5! Someone correct me if I am wrong? Great work on the plugin :-).

Mine so far

This is great! Working for me on my HD5H. Uploading and downloading :-D. One issue was that I couldn't playback in winamp any MP3s located on the Walkman? I also see some random characters in the column that shows what has been modified when just browsing my HD5s library. Thanks for the hard work!

Thanks for the hard work, this will be great! . Will you be adding support for the latest winamps portable device sync?

Some more changes

Sonicstage caches the images it loads on exit so when you change them nothing happens because it is still picking up the older cached images. Delete these files to remove the cache: for the images/bmps C:\Program Files\Sony\SonicStage\Data\XML\App.bmp_ for the xml files C:\Program Files\Sony\SonicStage\Data\XML\App.xml_ Had a go myself