[zero10]

I just wanted to come on here and share my story with you guys. This forum has proven invaluable in helping me to get my Kobo up and running again, but ultimately I ended up going a bit beyond what I have found in the threads here. I want to thank everybody who posted any bit of advice that helped me along the way.

Here is my story: I have a black Kobo, bought online from the Chapters store and I received it June 21, 2010. It had firmware 1.0 on it and the text resizing bug was getting very annoying since the vast majority of books/documents I had on the device were converted from .txt files using Calibre, so I thought I would upgrade it to 1.4 in an attempt to repair this issue.

I plugged in the Kobo to my windows machine (Windows 7 ultimate, 64-bit, english) and installed the desktop software, then ran it. This was the first hint things were going to go badly.
When you open the program it says an update is required, so I tell it to go ahead and update. It then pops up a window that says it is trying to gracefully close the Kobo application, but the Kobo application never closes. The installer gets part-way through then displays an error writing file "Kobo.exe". I saw that the application was still running but I could not close it so I used task manager to kill it, then allowed the update to run. After it finished I got a bit paranoid so I closed the application and re-opened it, it worked fine, so I rebooted then re-opened it again and still it worked fine. Convinced the problems were behind me I went through the upgrade steps for my Kobo, which initially completed without any problems. After the update was applied I did not get asked to re-enter the date and time on the Kobo, and all of the pre-loaded books were missing. I tried to browse to the settings menu but my Kobo froze.

I reset the Kobo and went directly to the settings menu, where it displayed that my firmware version was 1.4, but the revision field was blank. I tried to open an EBook I had on the device but it froze. I reset it, then tried again, another freeze. This book was on the SD card (yes I did remove it during the upgrade as required) so I removed the SD card and reset the Kobo again. Now it would not even start up. It gets to the start-up screen and only 3 dots of 7 appear and it hangs indefinitely. I was getting kind of angry at this point.

I go back to my computer and try to launch the Kobo application but now I only get an error message Kobo.exe failed to start with the error code "0xc000007b". I plugged my Kobo into my computer hoping to copy the installer over and try this all over again, but now my Kobo is no longer recognized as a mass storage device. I tested this under Windows, Linux (Fedora 12) and Macos (10.5.8), it doesn't show up under any operating system. I dug through the forums here for a while and the Koboreader.com site and had no luck at all finding a download link for the program. I was about 7 steps past angry now. Finally I remembered that I had been slightly cautious and had copied the installer to my desktop before running it. I un-installed and re-installed the program and now I had it running again, however I could not get my Kobo into upgrade mode since it would not power off. It would always freeze before turning off or going to sleep.

I figured out the following trick to get the device into upgrade mode:
Hold the menu button with your left pinky finger, and power button with your left index finger. Use your left thumb to keep a firm grip on the device. Use your right thumb to hold the center D-pad button then your right index finger to push the paperclip on the reset button. Hold it for a second then release ONLY your right index finger. During the reboot it will notice the buttons are held and will go into firmware upgrade mode.

I tried re-updating it 3 times before finally giving up, it only got worse and worse with each flash. By the end of it the device only recognized the internal storage as being 168MB instead of 802 (or whatever it is supposed to be), and I could barely get into any menus at all before it would crash/freeze.

I called Kobo tech support. I was kept on hold for 11 minutes before my call was answered. I outlined all of the steps I took for the agent and he basically said "Yeah, that is a return-to-depot kind of thing. We mail you an envelope, you put it in, mail it back, we fix it then mail it back to you". I asked how long it takes and he said around 2 weeks. I mentioned that I read on here that they could mail me an SD card and he confirmed they could, and that it would likely only take 2 days instead of 2 weeks. Now we are getting somewhere I thought, but with this confirmed I thought I would ask one more question: Did you mail these cards to the Chapters stores for them to do the flashes? He confirmed they did. Great, now we have gone from 2 weeks to repair it down to 1 hour, about the time it takes to pack up my wife, baby and Kobo, then head to the local Chapters. Why this was not his first suggestion I will never know. I mean seriously, you tell your customers to wait 2 weeks when there is an easy solution that will take 1 hour? Come on.

At my local chapters I was greeted by a VERY friendly guy who was very knowledgeable about the entire upgrade process and confirmed that they do have the SD cards available for flashing. I was given a $10 gift certificate (to chapters, not Kobobooks...) for my trouble, a coupon code for a free book (1 of 3 choices) and a card with more information about the firmware update. The only thing that went wrong here was I had to show him the reset trick to get it into SD card update mode since it would not power off (it is very similar to the above, except you don't hold the power button). It blinked in and out of SD update mode 3 times and rebooted inbetween without any intervention before finally starting the update process. Within 10 minutes I was headed out the door with my Kobo alive once again. The person who updated my Kobo for me was very helpful and even offered to bend the rules and replace my device if he couldn't get it going again, even though I was well past the return period (14 days IIRC). I won't post the store details here as I do not wish for this person to find himself in any trouble over this matter, but to be honest he is the ONLY reason my Kobo is not for sale on EBay right now.

All-in-all the update process took 5 hours and nearly resulted in the smashing death of my Kobo e-reader from sheer frustration.
Distributing the desktop software SOLELY on a device that CAN FAIL is a terrible idea, and obviously this firmware update process was not tested well enough because this was a complete nightmare for me.

Unless firmware 1.5 (or whatever the next one is) makes this device shoot freakin' rainbows out the front I will never EVER update the firmware on this device again, and I will be recommending that each of my friends buys the Kindle and not this disaster-in-a-box.