PRS-T1 Stuck on opening book screen - my reader's internal flash has died...

[uboot]

Today, my reader was stuck on the opening book screen.


I was able to boot into recovery and discovered that the partitions 2p8, 2p9 and 2p10 where missing.

Tried to repair the partition table with fdisk, but when I tried to store the new table, fdisk showed a write error. According to dmesg, there have been I/O errors on the internal flash just near to the sectors where the missing partitions start.


It is not the first time that I saw mmcblk2 I/O errors via dmesg. But this time it seems to be the end.


So, to all of you that are stuck on the opening book screen - defective internal flash memory might be a cause


Let's see if Sony will repair it on warranty... I'll try to remove all traces indicating that the reader had been rooted...

[medard]

Originally Posted by uboot

Let's see if Sony will repair it on warranty... I'll try to remove all traces indicating that the reader had been rooted...

I'm sure they will. Chances are quite high that they'll give you a new Reader instad of repairing the old one if you're still under warranty. This devices are cheap, I don't think Sony will analyse the flash memory. I assume they'll simply throw it away if it's not working. Even if they would analyse the memory, there's no reason to worry. You can't loose anything.

[uboot]

Well - according to their website, they may charge me a fee if my warranty turns out to be void.

Luckily I was able to revert the repartitioning by editing the partition table via fdisk using rupor's sd recovery. I also reflashed the boot loader and recovery kernel to disable adb / rooting.

But all partitions above mmcblk2p7 where inaccessible. My only chance was to copy back image dumps via dd directly to the mmcblk2 device with the seek option set to the partition starting sector. Unfortunately, dd stops when a write error occurs. I wish it would skip bad blocks and continue writing to the good ones.

Anyways - I didn't want to spend the whole afternoon messing with it and finally sent it to a Sony Repair Center.

If they do a dump of the internal flash, e.g. via ddrescue, they'll definitely find bytes indicating that the reader was rooted, as well as maybe my Google and Amazon Kindle account data. But as you said - I doubt they'll do that much effort.

Fingers crossed




Meanwhile I got myself a Kobo Mini for a third of the price I could have bought a PRS-T2 and I even consider selling the PRST1 if it ever comes back repaired, because I like the smaller form factor of the Kobo and I also appreciate the stable Linux firmware - it's all about reading ebooks and the book shelve feature is awesome, especially in conjunction with Calibre.

It boots up much faster and there is no more messing around with crashing Android Apps, wake_locks causing battery drain, fixing app permissions, repartitioning, etc. And the internal flash is a µSD-Card that can be easily dumped for backup and replaced with a bigger one

The only things I miss are PDF reflow, pinch-to-zoom and hardware buttons.

But displaying complicated PDF with technical drawings is way faster than on the PRS-T1!!

[batchaesir]

I have encountered I/O error several times.
you can try to locate the bad blocks and skip them when recreating the partitions.
I dont know if that helps.

[uboot]

I already did that on file system basis: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...05#post2592605

But some day later it got worse. The device went so bad, that whole partitions disappeared from the partition table. I tried to recreate these partitions but it was impossible to use the old starting sectors.

You're right - I could have created the missing partitions in other places, leaving gaps on the device, but these gaps would have been very big - I might have lost like 100MB. With the internal flash that much damaged I gave up and sent it in for repair.





EDIT: got the reader back, mainboard replaced, 1.05 firmware preinstalled, reader still crashes on epubs Kobo has no trouble with, did a full dump via rupor sd rescue and rooted again with rupor minimal... but I'm tempted to simply sell the T1...