Clara HD Clara HD getting wiped while sideloading books

[apastuszak]

I bought a Clara HD a while ago, and use it to sideload books. My old ereader was a Kindle, and I libertated all those books and converted them to ePub

I copied the books over to the Clara HD using Calibre on my Mac. I then plugged it in again about an hour later to copy over one more book. When I did that, the books transferred, but Calibre never added the green checkbox to show that the item was added to the device.

So, I ejected the device and unplugged the microUSB cable. The device rebooted, and I came up to blank screen. After a minute the screen flashed, but stayed blank. A dozen reboots later, and the thing finally came back up again, but it ran through the setup assistant again and made me log back into my Rakuten account. And the device was wiped. Not a single book on it.

This is now the third time this has happeneded to me since I bought the device.

Is this a known issue, or am I just unlucky? It's easy enough the put the books back, but losing the reading position for the sideloaded books really sucks.

[rashkae]

Sounds like your device is getting so badly frozen, you inadverdently trigger a factory reset while trying to reboot. It's impossible to diagnose from just this, but if I were to take my best guess, it would be errors on the Internal memory corrupting the filesystem. Good news on the Clara HD, however, it is easy to replace yourself. (I say easy, but you might still want to find some hands on help if that sounds like greek.)

[apastuszak]

Originally Posted by rashkae

Sounds like your device is getting so badly frozen, you inadverdently trigger a factory reset while trying to reboot. It's impossible to diagnose from just this, but if I were to take my best guess, it would be errors on the Internal memory corrupting the filesystem. Good news on the Clara HD, however, it is easy to replace yourself. (I say easy, but you might still want to find some hands on help if that sounds like greek.)

I assume the memory is just an SDcard that I can swap out with a new one?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by apastuszak

I assume the memory is just an SDcard that I can swap out with a new one?

Yep. I replaced mine with a 64GB card.

However, you might also just want to replace your Clara if you got a dud (and if it is still under warranty).

Also, make sure your Clara isn't running firmware 4.31.19086. That one caused many people to have issues. Firmware before and after that one have all been pretty stable on my Clara. But 4.31 was cursed.

[JSWolf]

It could be a corrupt database. You would have to sign out and sign back in if it is. Install Kobo Utilities if need be and use it to check the database.

[apastuszak]

The Clara HD is on loan to a friend. I'll need to call her and see what the firmware is that's on it. I did a check for firmware before I lent it to her, and it said I was up to date. So, I have to assume it's past 4.3.1.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by apastuszak

The Clara HD is on loan to a friend. I'll need to call her and see what the firmware is that's on it. I did a check for firmware before I lent it to her, and it said I was up to date. So, I have to assume it's past 4.3.1.

That depends on the affiliate and when they'll have 4.33.x available. If it's not on 4.33, you could do a manual install from https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html

[apastuszak]

It's the Walmart model. I'll call her tonight.

[Cootey]

Originally Posted by apastuszak

I bought a Clara HD a while ago, and use it to sideload books. My old ereader was a Kindle, and I libertated all those books and converted them to ePub

I copied the books over to the Clara HD using Calibre on my Mac. I then plugged it in again about an hour later to copy over one more book. When I did that, the books transferred, but Calibre never added the green checkbox to show that the item was added to the device.

So, I ejected the device and unplugged the microUSB cable. The device rebooted, and I came up to blank screen. After a minute the screen flashed, but stayed blank. A dozen reboots later, and the thing finally came back up again, but it ran through the setup assistant again and made me log back into my Rakuten account. And the device was wiped. Not a single book on it.

This is now the third time this has happeneded to me since I bought the device.

Is this a known issue, or am I just unlucky? It's easy enough the put the books back, but losing the reading position for the sideloaded books really sucks.

When I had this problem with my brand new Elipsa last year, it was a corrupted database at fault. In my case, there was a bug involving open CBZ files corrupting the database that was later fixed, but the only way to solve it was to factory reset the device. Until I learned that CBZ files were the culprit, I had a lot of database corruption issues. I even exchanged my Elipsa for a new one, and still had corruption problems. They’re a pain.

So, a few points:

1) Losing your place is frustrating. If you have Kobo Utilities installed with Calibre, you can enable automatic database backups from the Kobo Utils drop down menu when the device is plugged in. That should save you trouble in the future when you restore your database after a crash.
2) More>Settings>Device Information>Factory Reset is where you’ll find your likely cure. Repairing the account doesn’t repair database corruption on your device.

If factory reset doesn’t fix this, then you might be looking at a hardware issue. Others will know better than I on that subject.


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