s1fwx (s1 firmware extractor) is a free commandline tool (public domain) which lets you extract the original firmware from your s1 mp3 player device plus additional futures support operations on the firmware files like decrypt, extract and archive. this way you could investigate all the files included in any fw file, change their content and put them back together.
There are two known archive formats:
AFI: this archives include files needed to flash the device, a minimal set may consist of an BRECFxxx.BIN (the bootloader) and a FWIMAGE.FW file (as below)
FW/FWI: firmware image files include all firmware files needed during runtime
Commandline usage:
usage: s1fwx {i|x|s|a|l|f|r} {filename{:[afi|fw|enc]}} examples: display file info s1fwx i fname.ext extract firmware file s1fwx x fname.ext generate script from file s1fwx s fname.ext > new.script create firmware file by script s1fwx a new.fw:fw < def_fw.script create afi file by script s1fwx a new.bin:afi < def_afi.script list entire content of any file s1fwx l *.bin extract firmware from player s1fwx f dump.bin repair dumped firmware files s1fwx r dump.bin
You may need admin-rights to extract firmware from your player.
How To Extract and Repair Firmware?
Extracting your players firmware is a very good idea just to create a backup of the original firmware files. It's no promise that you could always backup your player after some bad firmare update, but at least you have some more possibilities.
First download newest version of s1fwx from the link provided at the last of this post and extract the archive.
Then connect your mp3 player device to your computers USB port and wait until it gets detected.
Now double click the extracted file "extract.bat" or run "s1fwx f dump.bin" from the windows commandline console. Skip the disclaimer by pressing space and select the drive your player gets mounted to. (eg. if detected drives displays "<x>" then choose drive "x:" by pressing x)
Now s1fwx should start extracting your firmware, this may take arround 10 seconds.
If everything went well and no error gets displayed it will display the content of the extracted firmware file as it was redden from your player.
Before you could update your player with this firmware file using the original "Mp3 Player Update Tool" you will first have to repair it.
Start "repair.bat" or type "s1fwx r dump.bin". A backup will be saved at "dump.bi$" automatically and the repaired file is now available as "dump.bin".
Notice that its not possible to do a firmware recovery with this file (only regular firmware updates) since there are missing files needed by the "Mp3 Player Update Tool" recovery mode. Since this files couldn't be found on your player you will need to get them from some official firmware file which is known to work with your players hardware.
Either you first could recover to this firmware before updateing to "dump.bin", or you could insert the needed files from the original AFI file into "dump.bin" using s1fwx. The original firmware has to support your flash chip(s). It doesn't matters if its just using different backlight or key-mapping.
Extracting Firmware
Here some example how to extract the whole content of the AFI file "firmware.bin". Place firmware and s1fwx in one folder, open commandline console (run "cmd") and go to the folder containing the files. To extract the AFI type "s1fwx x firmware.bin". Then make a sub- folder "md fw", change "cd fw" and extract the firmware files using "../s1fwx x ../fwimage.fw". Now you should have extracted all the files usually included in some general firmware file.
There are two known archive formats:
AFI: this archives include files needed to flash the device, a minimal set may consist of an BRECFxxx.BIN (the bootloader) and a FWIMAGE.FW file (as below)
FW/FWI: firmware image files include all firmware files needed during runtime
Commandline usage:
usage: s1fwx {i|x|s|a|l|f|r} {filename{:[afi|fw|enc]}} examples: display file info s1fwx i fname.ext extract firmware file s1fwx x fname.ext generate script from file s1fwx s fname.ext > new.script create firmware file by script s1fwx a new.fw:fw < def_fw.script create afi file by script s1fwx a new.bin:afi < def_afi.script list entire content of any file s1fwx l *.bin extract firmware from player s1fwx f dump.bin repair dumped firmware files s1fwx r dump.bin
You may need admin-rights to extract firmware from your player.
How To Extract and Repair Firmware?
Extracting your players firmware is a very good idea just to create a backup of the original firmware files. It's no promise that you could always backup your player after some bad firmare update, but at least you have some more possibilities.
First download newest version of s1fwx from the link provided at the last of this post and extract the archive.
Then connect your mp3 player device to your computers USB port and wait until it gets detected.
Now double click the extracted file "extract.bat" or run "s1fwx f dump.bin" from the windows commandline console. Skip the disclaimer by pressing space and select the drive your player gets mounted to. (eg. if detected drives displays "<x>" then choose drive "x:" by pressing x)
Now s1fwx should start extracting your firmware, this may take arround 10 seconds.
If everything went well and no error gets displayed it will display the content of the extracted firmware file as it was redden from your player.
Before you could update your player with this firmware file using the original "Mp3 Player Update Tool" you will first have to repair it.
Start "repair.bat" or type "s1fwx r dump.bin". A backup will be saved at "dump.bi$" automatically and the repaired file is now available as "dump.bin".
Notice that its not possible to do a firmware recovery with this file (only regular firmware updates) since there are missing files needed by the "Mp3 Player Update Tool" recovery mode. Since this files couldn't be found on your player you will need to get them from some official firmware file which is known to work with your players hardware.
Either you first could recover to this firmware before updateing to "dump.bin", or you could insert the needed files from the original AFI file into "dump.bin" using s1fwx. The original firmware has to support your flash chip(s). It doesn't matters if its just using different backlight or key-mapping.
Extracting Firmware
Here some example how to extract the whole content of the AFI file "firmware.bin". Place firmware and s1fwx in one folder, open commandline console (run "cmd") and go to the folder containing the files. To extract the AFI type "s1fwx x firmware.bin". Then make a sub- folder "md fw", change "cd fw" and extract the firmware files using "../s1fwx x ../fwimage.fw". Now you should have extracted all the files usually included in some general firmware file.
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