HP IPAQ 6510 / 6515 dead GSM after failed Firmware upgrade

HP released this IPAQ as 6510a,b and 6515a, b, c, d e, apparently they are all the same hardware except the 6515s have an additional camera.

UPDATE: Possible cause of these mentioned here

Alot of people including myself have lost the GSM Radio stack from a failed firmware update even though we were all using original firmware updates released by HP.

So far there has been NO FIX for this problem which seems to be caused by HP. Fortunately for me, my IPAQ was still under warranty and I managed to get it fixed by HP and they replaced my main board with no additional cost. Others have not been so lucky and many simply threw their IPAQ away.

So I thought I’d share my research in this matter which was carried out with the help of dim92 and simtech from mobilitytoday’s IPAQ forum. Hopefully this will help someone find a fix, and if you do please update me on that.

Follow up:

Research

Some lucky people have got their radio rom back by running this P10504_BT_HP_Radio_Patch.EXE. AFAIK this is simply a radio update by itself and is not much different from a standard firmware upgrade except it does not upgrade CE OS.

Updating CEOS only

Restoring CEOS is easy, just to go the HP page and download the LATEST official rom update. You can go to the folder where the hprup files are and look for an ini file. There will be one that looks like

CEOS=CEOS.nbf
Extrom=extrom.nbf
radiofs=radiofs.nbf

Now, you just delete the radio ones and run the update again. It should install CEOS and the extrom

Extract of my RadioROM

I extracted from start address of 60000000 with a length of 800000 what I think is my radio rom and this can be downloaded at
http://www.bold.net.au/~behave/radioROM.zip
I came up with this address from experimentation and addresses from other XDAs and extracted with the following command


USB>d2s 60000000 800000
SD:Waiting for card insert.........

CMD3 for SD, it's OK, ready to get RCA from response.

SD:Detected one card

SD:ready for transfer OK

pc->drive.total_lba=1EB400
pc->drive.num_heads=0
pc->drive.sec_p_track=0
pc->drive.num_cylinders=0
pc->drive.block_size=200
pc->drive.features=0
pc->drive.RCA=CFAD
pc->drive.drv_type=40000000
pc->drive.securedAreaSize=0
pc->drive.securityDrv=0
pc->drive.busWidth=1
pc->drive.erasedSize=0
Total card size=3D680000

SDCARDD2S+,cStoragePlatformType=FF

********************************
Store image to SD/MMC card successful.



Anything higher and the dump fails.


USB>d2s 60000000 800001
SD:Waiting for card insert.........

CMD3 for SD, it's OK, ready to get RCA from response.

SD:Detected one card

SD:ready for transfer OK

pc->drive.total_lba=1EB400
pc->drive.num_heads=0
pc->drive.sec_p_track=0
pc->drive.num_cylinders=0
pc->drive.block_size=200
pc->drive.features=0
pc->drive.RCA=CFAD
pc->drive.drv_type=40000000
pc->drive.securedAreaSize=0
pc->drive.securityDrv=0
pc->drive.busWidth=1
pc->drive.erasedSize=0
Total card size=3D680000

********************************Read radio flash is fail!



The size of the uncompressed ROM is around 1gig because I only have 1gig sd cards to dump the ROM on.

You will probably need a 1gig or larger SD card, dim92 tried writing to a smaller card and the IPAQ doesn’t recognize it but you are welcome to give it a try on smaller cards as most of the image are 0s anyway.

Once you have written the image on to an sd card (use any of the bigrom guides using ntrw), pop it into the IPAQ and enter boot loader mode (power + joystick + reset). It should show up with “Download Sections: 1 press power to start".

Press power button and it should show “Updating radio". Let it finish and if it completed with no errors, power up to see if the mobile phone works. If it still does not work, try running the beetles radio patch now. If this too does not work, try running the LATEST rom from HP.

Useful utilities

• iPAQDisk
• http://www.xs4all.nl/~itsme
• HOWTO: Change serial number and model number for HP IPAQ 6515
• HP IPAQ 6515 Bootloader password
• 
  Exploring HP IPAQ 6515e bootloader