PRS-T1 Possibly toast - Need advice.

[DoctorM]

One of my PRS-T1's bought as new from eBay a few months ago has started acting strangely.

Shutting down last night it froze mid shut-down. Finally got it restarted by charging it and soft resetting. I allowed it to charge to 100% before putting it into standby for the night.

This morning it wouldn't come out of standby and plugging it in to get it started showed that the charge is again empty.

Would a factory reset help or are we talking short or dead battery?
The last charge was just under a week ago with moderately heavy use, although it usually lasts a couple weeks.

Edit: I was just talking to my father who was using it when this happened, and apparently it wouldn't complete shut down. It just kept spinning and spinning the arrow icon.

I TRIED a factory reset, but again the endless spinning arrow. Soft resetting during either the factory reset or the shut down lock up will allow me to re-start the unit, but it just seems incapable of fully shutting down.

Edit 2: Okay, fixed it... round about and only mostly.
After tweaking the Sony flasher utility to force a re-flash of the 1.0.07 firmware, I bricked this.
I then used a recovery image for v1.0.04 firmware via a microsd card which unbricked it and then I reflashed v1.0.07 to be safe.

Unfortunately now I have a hybrid firmware. It SAYS the firmware is v1.0.07, but it still shows the Sony Reader store instead of Kobo.

Any suggestions on that? Is there a 1.0.07 recovery image? The shutdown bug is fixed, but I'm uncomfortable since I don't know which parts of which firmware are actually being used.

Edit 3: Sorted. Learned way too much about these readers tonight and killed a lot of time, but I used the method below to give the T1 the illusion of running an older firmware and then reflashed successfully to 1.0.07: https://community.sony.com/t5/Reader...re/td-p/460702

Anyone who needs help with a reader that won't shut down properly, bricks, or needs to downgrade the firmware, I can probably give advice.

[jerryleejr]

Lol, I just went thru the same thing and luckily after a lot of trial and error and a donor T1 mines up and running again.

JJ

[DoctorM]

It helped that I have three T1's. If you don't have an extra, you need something with a microSD reader.

[DoctorM]

Originally Posted by jerryleejr

Lol, I just went thru the same thing and luckily after a lot of trial and error and a donor T1 mines up and running again.

JJ

Dang. My T1 did this again last night.
I refuse to go through the same process as last night, it's cheaper to buy a new reader than spend that kind of time.

What method did you use with the donor T1?

[DoctorM]

Sorry to reply to myself but I wanted to report what I did this time and ask a question for the community.

(If anyone wants a FULL guide on how to do this, let me know.)
First, I unbricked the reader with Porkupan's SD rescue package using the method shown here: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/PRS...C_sd_rescue.29

Next I had to fix the fact that this makes the firmware a hybrid of two versions. That requires convincing the reader that the version is lower than 1.0.07 and reflashing the current firmware.

I did this by putting the reader in recovery mode using rupor-resuce, PuTTY and the linux-cdc-acm.inf. Method is here: https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/PRS...covery_Console

Then I copied the contents of the reader drive to my PC (in Recovery Mode), and used
the hex editor HxD to find and replace all occurrences of the text "1.0.07.05070" with "1.0.03.11140".

Once that was done I copied the data back over the contents of the reader's drive.
This is described here: https://community.sony.com/t5/Reader...p/523641#M1774

Finally, the reader can be reflashed with the 1.0.07 firmware and all is good again.

Now here is where I went off the path. Instead of flashing 1.0.07 I flashed 1.0.05 and rooted the reader to see what there was to see there.

My impression was so-so since most apps are now less functional (for example Pandora for this version of Android is no longer supported) and I figured I'd unroot and reflash to 1.0.07. That presented it's own challenges and didn't go smoothly. (No need to detail that.)

My take away was a question for the community:

(TL;DNR ->) Instead of dumping the contents of the reader's drive, editing the firmware version numbers and copying it back (or in fact when my reader first had the shut down problem described in the first post), couldn't I have just run the unrooting restore-set (which seems to do exactly the same thing) and then reflashing to 1.0.07?

Edit: Haven't tested what I said there, but other discussions suggest this will create a mixed firmware version.

[radius]

Wow, you have dogged persistence! And I'm glad to have that link to the Sony forum...

[vietchovui]

I cannot connect my PRS T1 to computer (Windows 10 64 bit and Live Ubuntu on USB) even the rupor-rescue package is on Micro USB. Any suggestion? Pleasee..........

[DoctorM]

Yeah, that's a problem when that happens.