I just wanted to put in a reply here and (quite happily) say that I just debricked a Kindle Touch I got recently. I've had a Nook Simple Touch for almost a year now and love it, but I wanted to pick up a KT and use it as an ecookbook basically. I got one with a broken screen (but working internals) from eBay with the intention to fix it, but it turns out that the other non working one I got later with an intact screen worked perfectly once it had charged and I did a factory restore and registered it to myself. But soon after is when it went downhill...
When I was updating to 5.1.0, I ended up bricked, and stuck in a "Your Kindle needs repair" bootloop. Since I'm a Windows user I was using MfgTool mainly (and the "noob" debricking guide PDF) and had everything working fairly well until I lost the libusb Kindle Touch device and couldn't get it back anymore, so I couldn't proceed in Windows. From that point I could still get diags working with MfgTool, but I think I was getting problems with fastboot, and couldn't get SSH access to continue the steps in the PDF anyway. I had Lubuntu 12.04 set up on a laptop but never got around to using it much, and decided I'd try that way. Since my Lubuntu install was nearly pristine I had to set up a lot of things here and there like libusb-dev and so on (which is a lot of fun for us Windows users to do when we have no clue what we're doing
), and also imx_usb_loader and yifanlu's kindle-fastboot. After about 6 frustrating hours last night, I made progress today once I had everything built. I still was able to follow the noob debricking PDF, but I was doing it solely from a linux environment.
So in short, now my Kindle is working fine (though still just on 5.0.0 at the moment, and I think it had 5.0.4 before it bricked itself). I'll update it later, but at least I know if it bricks itself again during a legitimate update like it did last time, I can fix it. I wanted to reply in here that I was successful and thank everyone involved in setting up this information for everyone.
Also, on a funnier note, I'd like to add that I found this out by accident. Before I had read (and experienced) how a bricked Kindle will drain its battery really fast, I had it sitting right on top of my Nook Touch, which was in sleep mode with wireless off, and 53% charge left. My only explanation is the constant wireless activity that drains bricked Kindles was somehow interacting with my Nook Touch and drained it as well. I was really freaked out when I went to read some more of a zombie anthology and my Nook was dead, and hilariously frozen in displaying the cover of the zombie book (I use Coolreader as my reader app for that feature). After plugging it into a charger though, the info screen about the charge being too low to power on came up so I realized what had happened. It wasn't something I verified by trying it again, but for anyone else out there working with bricked Kindles, you may want to keep them away from working ereaders while bricked.
