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Note: This will void your warranty. Nokia recommends you RMA faulty IP130s for repair.

Why:
I look after a number of Nokia appliances of varying models, but the IP130s were shipped with dodgy hard drives for which Nokia have issued a product notice. Most of the IP130s I have are out of warranty and I don’t have support for, so I thought it would be fun to crack one of the faulty units open and see what could be done to repair it. When I searched the net I didn’t get too much help, most postings suggested that a hard disk replacement could not be done without RMAing the IP130 to Nokia. I found this dude's blog entry as a starting point and refined the steps from there.

How it works:
Nokia uses a 4Mb boot partition to store their boot manager. The IPSO filesystems are loaded from the second partition (which uses the remainder of the disk). To reload IPSO onto a blank disk you need to setup the disk with two partitions and copy the boot manager into partition 1.


Required tools:
- Linux R.I.P rescue CD download and burn Bootable CD ISO (RIP-14.7.grub.iso.bin) image
- Nokia boot flash, download from Nokia (requires logon to site), or use the CD that shipped with the IP130. This file is called something like: nkipflash-3.8.bin. The version doesn’t really matter as it will be upgraded if required you load IPSO
- Nokia IPSO operating system, download from Nokia (requires logon to site), or use the CD that shipped with the IP130.
- 2.5” to 3.5” hard disk conversion cable
- Replacement 2.5” hard disk (I’ve not tested >20Gb, but 20Gb and less work OK)
- PC with IDE bus and CDROM drive
- Torx (T6 I think) screwdriver, and a Philips head screwdriver


Prepare Replacement Disk:
- Cable up the 2.5” drive with the conversion cable into the PC and boot. I just use auto IDE drive detection. Make sure it’s the only hard disk in the PC
- Boot from the RIP CD and start the Linux Rescue System
- Logon as root
- Run fdisk /dev/hda and enter the following commands:
p (print partition list)
d (delete any existing partitions)
n (create new partition)
p (primary)
1 (partition #1)
1 (first cylinder)
+4096K (last cylinder)
n (create new partition)
p (primary)
2 (partition #2)
default (first cylinder)
default (last cylinder)
p (print partition list to see if you’re got two partitions)
t (change partition ID)
partition 1
hex code: a6
t (change partition ID)
partition 2
hex code: a5
a (set boot partition)
partition 1
w (write to disk)
- Insert your CD with the Nokia flash file
- mount /dev/hdd –t iso9660 /mnt/cdrom
- The CD should mount as read only.
- cd /mnt/cdrom
- Use the ls and cd commands to navigate to the flash file nkipflash-3.8.bin
- dd if= nkipflash-3.8.bin of=/dev/hda1
- halt
- Wait for power off to display and then power off the PC. Remove the 2.5” drive from the PC.


IP130 Disassembly:
- Remove the four main Torx screws from under the IP130
- Open the case and remove the three Torx screws that secure the mainboard
- Remove the mainboard, flip it over and remove the four screws that secure the hard disk
- Replace the old hard disk with the newly prepared disk.
- Connect the console cable and start your terminal emulator
- Power up the IP130
- If successful you should end up with a BOOTMGR[1]> prompt from where you can reload IPSO using the install command.
- Replace all the screws (don’t forget the ones under the hard drive) and load your applications.

I've had a dead Nokia IP130 on my workbench for a while and had another die yesterday, both with hard disk errors, so I had to get one of them going ASAP. Nokia will have you believe that you need to RMA these units to have the hard disks replaced, but you can easily reload IPSO onto a blank 20Gb 2.5" drive in under an hour if you've got all the tools for the job. See next post for the details.