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Linux on HP IPAQ h1940/h1945

Sunday, August 6, 2006 by digitalpeer

First of all, i've read around the h1940 and h1945 are the same hardware- just different model numbers to express what channel they were sold through.

Restoring Original Windows CE

This tutorial is adopted from the original at http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/HpIpaqH1940Restoring

In the event you screw something up (as I did) and you can't get a successful boot going, these steps will get your IPAQ back to their original state. Note that this will not help those that screwed up their primary bootloader. Those people will need JTAG to flash the first 256 bytes. As a side note, my original IPAQ software version was 1.0. You'll notice the image below will bring it up to 1.1 which is indeed newer and pretty-er.

First, download the image h1940_r2sd.img.bz2 from http://anymore.nl/ipaq/files/bootloader/

Stick your SD card into your Linux PC and erase it:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/device bs=1k

Unzip the image:

bunzip2 h1940_r2sd.img.bz2

Put the image on the device:

dd if=h1940_r2sd.img of=/dev/device bs=1k

Make sure and cleanly eject the SD card (ensuring the image is flushed):

eject device

First put the SD card in the device, then do a hard reset using these steps:

- Press and hold the Power button
- Press and release the Reset button
- The LCD turns off
- When the LCD turns on, immediately release the Power button

You should get a message asking if you want to load the image from the SD card. To say yes, press the middle button of the joypad.

Wait for the flash to finish (this can take several minutes).

Do a hard reset again (power and reset together, then release both).

All done.