Quote:
Originally Posted by murz_07
I'm afraid my problem isn't about computer anymore, it's very deep inside my Kindle. That's sad. Because geekmaster promissed that Kindle will always be able to boot in fastboot mode (at least first time before it gets modified using fastboot) and I now can see it's wrong. I hope it will turn out that problem is in me doing something wrong, but right now I have no idea.
BTW: Where is geekmaster? His last post here was a pretty long time ago (for him  ). I hope he can say something useful about my problem. |
I said it will always be able to boot into USB Downloader mode, even if you corrupt the flashboot code stored in mmc. You can flash another copy of bist u-boot to get fastboot working again.
But we have a problem (that is fixable). I successfully used yifanlu's fastboot to repair my k4nt before I owned a touch. My k4nt 4.0 was hopelessly bricked and nothing worked. I bought a replacement k4nt that came with 4.0.1. When I made my first modified u-boot, it was for k4nt only, and I added code to it to repair my k4nt, including writing a valid pcbns to it so that u-boot could decide how to initialize the hardware and continue, instead of just halting. I then booted to fastboot and flashed everything, after copying from my new k4nt. I flashed mmcblk0p1 and mmcblk0p2 and the main and diags kernels and bootloaders. I know that it worked for two reasons -- the flashing took a long time to complete, and it booted up into 4.0.1 (it was 4.0 before firmware flashing images from my new k4nt).
Now, on the touch, I see that in fastboot it reports "Success" in just a few seconds, and it quits. It cannot have flashed that much data in that short of a time.
So for now, fastboot method only works on the k4nt. It is not hopeless for the touch though. It is possible to boot a full bist (built-in self-test) version of the u-boot bootloader that includes a FIXED fastboot module, so that it WILL work. The problem is figuring out WHY it is not working, because I compared the 4.0.1 and 5.0.1 u-boot source code and the ONLY differences appear to be that 5.0.1 includes support for more devices (including the touch, and the k4nt, and other kindle models), and it has a little more sophisticated SDRAM initialization.
I might have missed something though because I was not aware of touch fastboot problems at that time. If you compare them and find a fastboot-related anomaly, please let me know the details about it.
Now, about ALWAYS being able to install our own custom code, we can do it by using MfgTool (or some new software program that can communicate with the kindle using USB Downloader mode). We can copy ANYTHING to the kindle RAM (not just u-boot). It could be another OS like android, or it could just be an extra memory-resident kernel-mode program that allows us to have root access even with a locked-down for encrypted mmc.
My next goal is to get fastboot working on my Touch. It can currently only boot to fastboot mode, and flashing "completes" too quickly. I plan to work on this until I succeed.
Meanwhile, last night on IRC I helped another Touch owner debrick his kindle that sat on the shelf in a previously HOPELESS condition. We gave up on trying to flash with fastboot. He booted to diags using my Select Boot tool (MfgTool and custom u-boots), then he used my data.tar.gz to run his RUNME.sh, which did "dd if=/mnt/us/mmcblk0p1.img of=/dev/mmcblk0p1 bs=1024". Then everything started working again.