Kindle touch bug that causes bricking (kindle needs repair message)

[bdrosen]

This may be helpful to other users who may have encountered the kindle needs repair error message while operating the device normally (ie not jailbreaking it).

Earlier today I encountered my second instance (on two different touches) of the kindle needs repair message, which generally requires the touch be shipped back to Amazon for a replacement. After some research I believe both of these were caused by the same thing - large numbers of books and collections.

In the kindle touch (and possibly other newer models) the collections information is stored on a hidden partition instead of the large 3-4 Gig partition containing the books like it was in earlier models. Specifically it is stored under /var/local as cc.db . This partition appears to be around 30 Megs, which is tiny. On my kindle I have close to 2000 books, and my file was something like 25 Megs, which caused the partition to be full. This prevented the kindle from booting, giving the needs repair message. Once the file was cleared away, it started working normally again. Needless to say, this is a horrible failure mode and could be handled much more gracefully.

I've reported this to the kindle technical folks, so hopefully a bug report has been created to track and fix this. Hopefully a future release such as 5.0.4 can fix this - perhaps by moving this file back to the book partition where there is more space. In the meantime, I was able to use the data.tar.gz and RUNME.sh to copy the cc.db from /var/local/ to /mnt/us/system and setup a symlink. After doing this, it works again and I still have my collections. This was possible because the USB file system was briefly visible during bootup and I was able to copy over the files quickly enough.

[blackjack13]

type echo 0 > /var/local/upstart/lab126_gui.restarts in RUNME.sh
on your computer then copy in Your kindle
Credit by Geekmaster

[bdrosen]

Originally Posted by blackjack13

type echo 0 > /var/local/upstart/lab126_gui.restarts in RUNME.sh
on your computer then copy in Your kindle
Credit by Geekmaster

I think you missed the point of my post. What you sent does not fix the brick problem, it just clear the needs repair message once the problem has been fixed. What my post was doing was to provide details about the actual cause of error and how it had been addressed so that clearing the restarts screen would allow it to boot, rather than just end up back with the same error message again.


As an additional follow up to my original post, it appears that 3/4 of the database file is made up of events in the table Collec