Boy, I'm a glutton for punishment. I just can't seem to stay away from this thing. I think I'm going to end up getting a serial cable and seeing what it's doing on boot. In the meantime, some more progress.
I was able to (auto)mount some kind of drive (not sure which partition this is) in Ubuntu, with the following files and directories:
Code:
bennett@Ubuntu-12:/media/Kindle$ ls -ll
total 117024
drwx------ 2 bennett bennett 8192 Aug 1 2011 audible
drwx------ 2 bennett bennett 8192 Dec 31 1979 diagnostic_logs
drwx------ 34 bennett bennett 24576 Nov 13 10:00 documents
drwx------ 2 bennett bennett 8192 Aug 1 2011 music
drwx------ 5 bennett bennett 8192 Nov 16 12:42 system
drwx------ 3 bennett bennett 8192 Dec 31 1979 tts
-rw-r--r-- 1 bennett bennett 119752543 Oct 11 10:03 update-2004410010-fwo.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 bennett bennett 168 Dec 31 1979 USBnet.xml
bennett@Ubuntu-12:/media/Kindle$
I renamed the "*.bin" file to "*.bin.old" and rebooted, to see if that would make a difference, but it didn't.
The diagnostic_logs directory was empty, unfortunately.
NOTE: At this point, the *only* reliable way for me to boot into diags is to get into fastboot mode (I think), turn the power on, and let the battery die. Then, I try to turn it back on, get the screen with the battery and the USB --> <lightning> underneath it. I plug it into the wall, give it about 5 minutes, and voila, I'm in diags. Not sure why this works. As long as I keep messing with this thing, I'll keep posting updates.