[iPAQ] Restore Microsoft ROM

The following might be useful to others...

I was working with an iPAQ 3950, and successfully installed Familiar and
Opie on it. Since I could never get the WI-IF card to work, I put the
iPAQ in the drawer and bought a Sharp SL-5600 which is working just
fine.

Then I tried restoring the original ROM following the instructions at
http://www.handhelds.org/handhelds-faq/wincerestoration.html
First I tried flashing the image I had backed up (wince.gz) in the
original installation. It gave many error messages, about regions being
too small.

Then I followed the instructions at
http://www.handhelds.org/z/wiki/Restoring%20Windows%20CE%20from%20the%20
Compaq%20iPAQ%20Update
to extract thru ROM image from the HP service Pack (SP23661 for the
3950), not realizing that the ROM image was too small - I think the 3950
has 32MB of flashable ROM. Anyway, with that image loaded I got the
red-and-white Splash screen and nothing more.

Based on the assumption that the ROM image needed to be 32MB, I
extracted 32MB from the SP23661 image as follows:
I extracted the files from the service pack to a working directory.
Using a Hex Editor, removed the first 32 bytes from
NK_Wisr111_00WWE_NBT.nbf, saving the file as wince3900.bin
Using Cygwin, I did
dd bs=1024 skip=256 count=32256 if=wince3900.bin of=flash.bin
(Without really understanding it! I couldn't find man pages for dd, I
assume it means to use block size of 1024, skip the first 256 blocks and
grab the next 32256.)
Then I flashed the iPAQ with the flash.bin I just made, and everything
works fine!

Anyway, thanks for the great web site and wiki. Maybe you could have
the above instructions added to the wiki for anyone else having trouble
with the 3900 series.

Walt

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Received on Wed Jun 23 10:08:17 2004