Thanks for the recovery image, the Kobo is alive again.
The whole story (somewhat long, but you probably like to read...
)
I had used the Kobo for a while, but let it gather dust for a long time.
My sister asked if I had an e-reader she could borrow for the holiday.
I charged it a whole day, gave it a factory reset and handed it to her.
When she tried to use it, it gave her the network error we all know...
After a few tries it did not start anymore, the USB was also dead.
- I opened the Kobo using the guitar pick from my iFixit toolkit.
- I put the 2GB uSD in a USB reader and placed it in my Linux PC.
- I made a backup image of the complete SD card contents using 'dd'.
- I checked the SD card with 'fsck', it found and repaired some errors.
- Repairing these errors did not fix the Kobo, it still would not start.
There was a recovery partition that looked like the rootfs.
- I 'dd' copied the recovery partition to the root partition.
- The Kobo started, showing the "Connect to a PC" screen.
Tried the WiFi route again, it still displayed the network error.
- I 'dd' copied the recovery partition to the root partition again.
- The Kobo started, showing the "Connect to a PC" screen.
This time I tried the Windows Kobo desktop application setup route.
After I entered my Kobo account login, it started to update the Kobo.
- The Kobo showed a black multi-language "Applying update" screen.
- That screen became corrupted, resolution did not match hardware?
- I was not very patient, thought it was stuck, so I reset the device.
My conclusion: Either the firmware is too old, or the SD is damaged.
I went looking for a factory restore image and asked for your link.
Next day I found your PM in my e-mail inbox and I downloaded it.
This was at the office, so I missed your message on the forum...
That evening I tried it again, this time with a known-good image.
- I 'dd' copied your recovery image to the SD card.
- I tried the WiFi route again, which still did not work.
Bummer.
- I 'dd' copied your recovery image to the SD card again.
- I tried the desktop setup route, since it should work now...
- The Kobo showed a black multi-language "Applying update" screen.
- That screen became corrupted again, exactly the same weird lines.
- I was patient this time, letting it run until it finally rebooted.
The Kobo showed a garbled screen with the update changes:
- It showed a 3cm high black bar with noise at the screen center.
- The buttons at the bottom only showed when I touched it there.
- I could not close the update-changes popup using the (X)
Strange, did it install a platform update for the Glo HD?..
I found
this page and downloaded
kobo-update-4.33.19608
- I made a backup copy of the activated .kobo folder.
- I 'dd' copied your recovery image to the SD card again.
- I copied the activated .kobo folder to the user partition.
- I copied the update archive contents to the .kobo folder
- I started the Kobo, it found the update and went to work.
- The display was glitching again, but I let it finish anyway.
- The update summary was displayed without errors..!?
So it is repaired, woohoo! But I don't know what I did wrong before...
Thank you very much for the fast response and your support!
One thing I would like to address:
It is a bit risky / annoying that there are no public download locations,
the internet is designed for redundancy, this is a
single point of failure...
If you need a free long-term host for your large essential recovery images,
perhaps the
Internet Archive is a place to store them for future generations?
Thanks again, have a nice day!