Hi everyone,
I'm trying to revive an HP iPAQ 110 (Blandina platform, Windows Mobile 6.0 Classic, Marvell PXA310 CPU) that is stuck on the initial white "+ hp" splash screen. I've conducted several diagnostics and need some advice from PDA/WM veterans.
Current Symptoms:
1. Boot Loop / Freeze: Hangs indefinitely at the initial "+ hp" logo screen.
2. Clean Boot Failure: Device enters Clean Boot (Record + Windows + OK + Reset), but freezes during the memory formatting stage.
3. Display Artifacts under load: During the Clean Boot freeze, subtle pixel color flickers/artifacts appear under certain viewing angles (looks like a brownout/voltage drop under heavy NAND load).
4. No Boot Without Battery: The device will NOT power on connected only to a 5V/2A charger without the battery installed (charge LED blinks; PMIC requires battery presence).
5. Battery Health: The battery is ~17 years old. Sometimes capacity jumps erratically (e.g., 44% -> 100%), indicating degraded cell condition and high internal resistance.
6. Bootloader / SD Update Mode: Pressing Calendar + OK + Reset fails to trigger the IPL SD flashing screen (no "Loading..." or progress bar).
What Has Been Attempted & Verified:
- SD Card Prep: Using an old 512MB physical SDSC card with a microSD adapter. Formatted via diskpart (MBR, Primary Partition, Active flag set, FAT16, 16KB cluster size).
- Firmware Image: Attempted flashing with hpimage.bin in the root folder. (Note: A previous flash was attempted with an incomplete ~58MB file; I now know the uncompressed ROM should be exactly 64MB).
- Multi-filename Masking: Tried hpimage.bin, BLNDIG.NB0, BLNDIG.BIN on the SD root.
- Power: Connected to a dedicated 5V/2A power supply during all attempts.
Questions for the Community:
1. Is the Clean Boot freeze accompanied by screen pixel artifacts a definitive symptom of PMIC brownout due to the degraded battery under peak load, or could it be physical NAND cell failure?
2. Does the iPAQ 110 IPL (Initial Program Loader) require a specific filename or timing key combo to force reading the SD card?
3. Has anyone successfully repacked an iPAQ 110/114 battery cell while preserving the original 3-pin BMS/BSI board?
Any insight, schematics, or advice on bypassing the PMIC check would be greatly appreciated!