Good news! I scored a free Kindle PaperWhite!
Bad news! It's free because it's broken.
I believe this is a PW1; the pictures of the inside certainly match. It's third hand from somebody who got it from somebody. The screen's frozen at the book reader page (showing Atlas Shrugged...).
When connected to power, the orange light comes on, but nothing otherwise happens. If I hold the power button down for 30 seconds the light goes off, to come back on again when I release the power; and sometimes (but not always) the computer I plug it into show USB error messages indicating that it's on the bus but is not accepting an address.
My assumption, therefore, is that it's getting partway through kernel boot and then panicking.
The next step is to hook up the serial port and see what it says. However, given the unutterable tinyness of the serial pads, and my not-very-good soldering skills (do I *really* need to solder to the *bottom* of that surface mount resistor?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/att...8&d=1352503423) I thought I'd better check first:
* Has anyone figured out a way to get the PW1 into USB Recovery or Fastboot mode without needing serial port access?
The light going off after holding the power button down suggests it's waiting for someone to press the magic key. Which, of course, the PW1 doesn't have. Are there a couple of pads to short, or something?
(Also, if anyone can suggest anything else to do before I wreck the thing, I'd be very grateful --- it's probably suffered hardware failure and is beyond hope anyway, but it'd be interesting to try.)
(Also, is that an unpopulated micro-SD card reader on the edge of the motherboard? Hmm...)