K3 Noob's guide to debricking through ATK :D

[syngress]

sorry to forgot to mention something I found odd, every 90 seconds the laptop beeps as if a usb device has been removed and then straight away beeps again as if a usb device has been connected. Under device Manager I have an item called Jungo with MX35 and Windriver as devices, not sure if that is correct either.

Thanks,

Mike

[knc1]

Originally Posted by syngress

sorry to forgot to mention something I found odd, every 90 seconds the laptop beeps as if a usb device has been removed and then straight away beeps again as if a usb device has been connected. Under device Manager I have an item called Jungo with MX35 and Windriver as devices, not sure if that is correct either.

Thanks,

Mike

There is a 90 second activity timer and that description sounds like it is timing out.
What activity is happening during those 90 second periods?

The other sounds correct also.

[syngress]

Nothing is happening in between, I have been sat here on my PC with the laptop next to me and the Kindle connected and you can just hear it every 90s beeping away.

I also have a confession to make, I was seemingly pressing the vol+ button instead of the vol- button although now I have seen the error of my ways it has made no real difference, now I saw no real difference because now as soon as I hit the program button in ATK I hear the laptop do its USB beeps, and the 'Failed to initial flash etc...' message is shown, where as before it would wait maybe 10 - 15 seconds.

Mike

[knc1]

Originally Posted by syngress

Nothing is happening in between, I have been sat here on my PC with the laptop next to me and the Kindle connected and you can just hear it every 90s beeping away.

Sounds correct to me. No activity on the connection.
You are supposed to make use of the connection in this mode, not just watch it.

[syngress]

LOL

Yes I have tried to flash at this point, but still just the 'Flash cant be initial' message

Mike

[rgerade]

A short intro: I've been following this thread for a couple of weeks trying to debrick a Demo K3. Got myself in trouble when trying to use ATK on Win 7 to rewrite the kernal and rootfs. When switching ATK Flash model to MMC/SD I didn't realize that it had reset the starting address back to 0x00000000 - oops! Am patiently awaiting for Hawhill to upload the boot code.

However, in my trials to get this all working I was having trouble trying to flash on one Win 7 machine but had no trouble on the other. I finally noticed when looking at the devices and printers screen I would get the SP Blank Ringo device with exclamation point and no driver loaded on the non-working computer and would get a normal looking device on the good computer. The driver that was being loaded was title MX35 using windrvr6.sys, device provider Jungo.

I ran the ATK uninstall process, plugged in my Kindle and rebooted. I then installed ATK 1.70 once again and made sure all the drivers got loaded. As soon as the MX35.inf file was loaded I heard the USB. Can now flash on both win 7 machines.

Maybe Hawhill will find time to upload the boot code he mentioned last week

Thanks

[hawhill]

Yeah, my buggy brain decided not to remember that promise properly - will do shortly. Will still take a few hours, i'm currently on a train ride home, after attending a wedding party, and not having slept for about 24 hours, i'm really looking forward to a little nap :-)

[twobob]

Okay well I'm going to play with kernels so I am guessing I will be needing this thread. Thanks hawhill qlob et all for your works

[hawhill]

Attached to this post is the partition table and the (open sourced, free software) boot loader part. It goes to offset 0x0 - after gunzipping it, of course (i.e.: don't flash this file directly).

However, this does not include the device ID part that seems to be at offset 0x00040c00. I'm not sure what exactly the K3 does when there's garbage data in that part, too. And in case you managed to write something to 0x0 of your eMMC device and want to recover, it would depend on the size of that something whether more than this partition table and bootloader is needed.

Kernel, Rootfs and this file do contain most of what you need for recovery, but not everything. I'm not sure what the function of the part is that is referred to as "ISIS" in Amazon's code - however, that could be determined. At least that part (offset 0x00381000, length 0x00040000) hasn't been made available as far as I know. And I would strongly recommend to not make the part that stores the device ID public...

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by hawhill

Attached to this post is the partition table and the (open sourced, free software) boot loader part. It goes to offset 0x0 - after gunzipping it, of course (i.e.: don't flash this file directly) ...

I added the URL of your post to the "simple debricking" pastebin, labelled as "bootloader 3.3". Pastebin URLs are not clickable, but hopefully people will figure it out.

If you have a better label for that URL that will fit a pastebin line, please let me know. Thanks.

[NiLuJe]

@hawhill: I vaguely remember ISIS being what the broadsheet controller uses to refer to the waveform... Take that with a grain of salt, though .

[rgerade]

Hawhill
Thanks for the boot loader 3.3 code. I'm travelling in Canada at the moment, but will try the code and post my results as soon as I return home.

Thanks again

[elisaf]

Originally Posted by hawhill

Attached to this post is the partition table and the (open sourced, free software) boot loader part. It goes to offset 0x0 - after gunzipping it, of course (i.e.: don't flash this file directly).

However, this does not include the device ID part that seems to be at offset 0x00040c00. I'm not sure what exactly the K3 does when there's garbage data in that part, too. And in case you managed to write something to 0x0 of your eMMC device and want to recover, it would depend on the size of that something whether more than this partition table and bootloader is needed.

Kernel, Rootfs and this file do contain most of what you need for recovery, but not everything. I'm not sure what the function of the part is that is referred to as "ISIS" in Amazon's code - however, that could be determined. At least that part (offset 0x00381000, length 0x00040000) hasn't been made available as far as I know. And I would strongly recommend to not make the part that stores the device ID public...

Thank you! After unzipping the file, am I also supposed to rename it somehow or can I flash the .img file? And when flashing it with ATK, are the steps the same as for kernel.bin and rootfs.bin? Sorry if these questions sound silly, but I don't know a damn thing about programming

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by elisaf

Thank you! After unzipping the file, am I also supposed to rename it somehow or can I flash the .img file? And when flashing it with ATK, are the steps the same as for kernel.bin and rootfs.bin? Sorry if these questions sound silly, but I don't know a damn thing about programming

Raw uncompressed images typically have file extensions of .img or .bin or .dmp (but are not limited to those extensions).

Compressed images typically end with .gz or .tar.gz or .zip or .7z or .bz2, but may use other compression methods in the future. Most images are compressed so that they will download faster and use less cloud storage space.

You MUST uncompress the compressed files before flashing them. Simply renaming them WILL NOT WORK.

You can flash any of the UNCOMPRESSED files. UPDATE: Some tools may require that you rename the raw uncompressed image files (see hawhill's post below).

[hawhill]

But right, I think ATK would require it to be named with a ".bin" suffix - though I cannot currently test this.