MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Trying to debrick, but connection keeps dropping

Zolyx · 12-01-2012, 09:22 AM

Hello all - I am very grateful to your site and community for providing a lot of really good information on Kindle unbricking and development. I found your site recently after a family Kindle Keyboard starting behaving strangely, and have been trying to fix it through the simple ATK guide for Windows.

First let me explain what I mean by "behaving strangely". The Kindle had been running absolutely fine with no problem until a week to ten days ago. But then, while reading a book, the screen would suddenly fade to white and become unresponsive. A random amount of time would pass, anything up to a few minutes to several hours, and the Kindle would reboot through the "tree with boy" screen, and arrive at a screen similar to Home with a message saying "Your Kindle is updated". It would then return to the book list.

This happened several times over the course of a week until finally it appeared to get stuck at about 1/3 through the boot screen and would go no further.

I believe that the battery has been extremely well charged during this time, both from a wall charger and through USB.

What I am trying to do now, as I mentioned above, is to use the unbricking guide to reflash the Kindle to version 3.0.2, assuming that somehow this problem was an automatic update that went wrong somehow (does Amazon stream Kindle firmware updates silently without you having to confirm you want them?). Before this attempt, the Kindle reported that it was on firmware version 3.4.

The problem I am having is that the Kindle download-mode connection through USB will drop for no obvious reason, and the amber power LED will go out. When this happens, any flash that is in progress will obviously fail. The furthest I have been able to get is just past 50% of the rootfs.bin flash.

I have tried flashing the Kindle on two separate computers, each running Windows XP SP3 32-bit with the ATK USB drivers installed correctly, and on each one the connection will randomly fail after a period of time.

Could anyone here advise me of what I might be doing wrong - I'm beginning to think that this is some kind of hardware fault and not actually a firmware problem at all. Would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance!

12-01-2012, 09:22 AM	#1
Zolyx Junior Member Posts: 3 Karma: 1010 Join Date: Dec 2012 Device: Kindle 3 Keyboard Wi-fi only	Trying to debrick, but connection keeps dropping Hello all - I am very grateful to your site and community for providing a lot of really good information on Kindle unbricking and development. I found your site recently after a family Kindle Keyboard starting behaving strangely, and have been trying to fix it through the simple ATK guide for Windows. First let me explain what I mean by "behaving strangely". The Kindle had been running absolutely fine with no problem until a week to ten days ago. But then, while reading a book, the screen would suddenly fade to white and become unresponsive. A random amount of time would pass, anything up to a few minutes to several hours, and the Kindle would reboot through the "tree with boy" screen, and arrive at a screen similar to Home with a message saying "Your Kindle is updated". It would then return to the book list. This happened several times over the course of a week until finally it appeared to get stuck at about 1/3 through the boot screen and would go no further. I believe that the battery has been extremely well charged during this time, both from a wall charger and through USB. What I am trying to do now, as I mentioned above, is to use the unbricking guide to reflash the Kindle to version 3.0.2, assuming that somehow this problem was an automatic update that went wrong somehow (does Amazon stream Kindle firmware updates silently without you having to confirm you want them?). Before this attempt, the Kindle reported that it was on firmware version 3.4. The problem I am having is that the Kindle download-mode connection through USB will drop for no obvious reason, and the amber power LED will go out. When this happens, any flash that is in progress will obviously fail. The furthest I have been able to get is just past 50% of the rootfs.bin flash. I have tried flashing the Kindle on two separate computers, each running Windows XP SP3 32-bit with the ATK USB drivers installed correctly, and on each one the connection will randomly fail after a period of time. Could anyone here advise me of what I might be doing wrong - I'm beginning to think that this is some kind of hardware fault and not actually a firmware problem at all. Would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks in advance!