WDTV Mini Bricked? Options

[garlicnation]

Hello all,

I've had my WDtv mini for about a week and have really enjoyed it. Today, when I got home from work, I plugged in my wdtv and saw the menu suddenly in complete black/white, and my unit wasn't responding to my remote. I did a reset(held reset button for four seconds), and the color of my screen came back, but my remote still doesn't work at all. Is there some kind of hack I can do on my box to try and get it working? this device is really awesome and I'd love to be able to use it again.

[WDUser]

There's a possibility the remote conked off too at the same time and the player's fine after all...

If you've already tried the hard reset button, then all I can recommend is you try a firmware re-flash (you might have to edit the version number in the WDTV.VER file using Notepad etc. to a higher number for the player to recognise the FW as 'new' when it isn't). If that doesn't help, contact WD Support.

[garlicnation]

WD is sending me a new remote already. How can I trigger a firmware flash without the remote?

[WDUser]

Once you have the (suitably edited) FW files on the root (i.e. not inside a sub-direcory) of a freshly-formatted FAT32 USB pen drive, just insert the drive and then plug the power cord in. On booting up the player should automatically find the 'new' FW on the pen drive and start the update process. If this doesn't happen, try other pen drives (different makes/models/manufacturers) since some just don't get detected by the player for reasons unknown.

[garlicnation]

There's no WDTV.VER when I download new firmware, just a firmware.img. I went into the firmware.img with a text editor and changed the version number that I found, but still no luck.

Is there some utility I can use to expand/recompress the .img file, or are you thinking of instructions for a different model wd tv?

Thanks for the guidance,
A.J.

[WDUser]

Whoops, you're right, the Mini's FW does indeed include only a single WDTV_mini.img file, whereas the FW for all the other models has .BIN, .VER and possibly .FFF files as well. Hmm, so that is tricky, and as you've found out, editing the binary compiled .IMG directly doesn't work. The thing is, on re-reading your first post I believe your player is working fine now after hard resetting it, except for the remote? If so, I would suggest you wait for the replacement remote to arrive and try that out. If it works, fine, else obviously there's something the matter with the player itself. That is when you can try to re-flash, or contact Support and ask for their help again.

P.S. If you do need to re-flash later, maybe WinImage can help expand/recompress the IMG, but I'm not sure since the file may just have a .IMG extension but not have any known standard internal structure that WinImage knows about. I tried opening the .IMG with MagicISO/PowerISO, but neither could recognise the file format, so WinImage too might not work...