Hi everyone,
I'm beginning to suspect that my KA1 is bricked
... I've searched through the forums as best I could, but haven't found any reports similar to what I've been experiencing with my device. Figured I'd at least make a post before either attempting to get an RMA from kobo, or abandoning hope altogether. *Fingers crossed* that someone here might have some insight into the problem.
Okay so first, some exposition. I've recently been having some *strange* issues with my KA1, which I purchased during the pre-order period and has been mostly problem free up to now. Sometime in November I installed KSM'08 and had been updating the Koreader nightlies every few weeks. This setup has been running smoothly up until a few days ago, when I tried to open a specific pdf in nickle. Nothing about this pdf is particularly noteworthy, aside from it being passed through k2pdfopt to crop margins and optimize for the KA1 display (most of the pdf's on my KA1 have been optimized by k2pdfopt, but none other than *this specific one* has caused any issues).
Anyway, I've been able to open and read this pdf in both nickle and koreader for weeks now. However, as of a few days ago, opening this pdf would, without fail, cause nickle to freeze and require a forced poweroff. The first time this happened, my device would fail to bootup again - it would simply go through the initial flashing blue light sequence, then go to a blank screen. After wrestling with this for a while, leaving it to charge for a few hours between attempts, I somehow managed to get the device to bootup into KSM'08 by connecting it to my computer.
Things seemed to be working well with the device for the rest of the day. After removing the problem pdf, then re-transering it from Calibre, nickle was able to open and read the pdf without any apparent issue. Feeling satisfied that things were resolved, I shut the sleepcover and put the device in my backpack overnight. However, when I went to use it the following day, the screen was blank and unable to bootup. Wash-rinse-repeat charging for hours and attempting to boot. I got impatient and did a manual factory reset of the device, which seemed to work at first... However...
TLDR:
After performing a manual factory reset on my KA1 (as outlined here:
https://www.kobo.com/help/en-US/arti...aura-edition-2), the device will begin to boot (5-dots screen), but hangs once it gets to the second dot. From here, the screen will stay frozen with 2/5 dots, while the status light blinks blue. If I force the device to power of, it will go through the same boot sequence, but will flash red / light-red until forced to power off again. So far, I have been unable to get the device to mount on either my linux or windows machines.
If anyone has any suggestions, I would be very grateful.