Help - Kindle stuck on Software Update

[quimby]

Hi folks. I decided to try the screensaver hack today. Followed the instructions at https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kind...nd_3.x_Kindles. Installed the jailbreak hack and the Kindle rebooted fine. Then I installed the screensaver hack, together with 4 jpg files. I went into Settings, Update your Kindle, and the Software Update screen appeared. It's been like that now for 20 minutes, and the progress bar hasn't progressed at all. I'm starting to get rather worried. Does anyone have any advice on what to do? Should I wait, or try something else (not sure what, though)? It's Kindle 3 3G UK, Serial no. prefix B00A.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Julie

[quimby]

Ah, well, I got it back. Found the 15-second reset information and did that. When I did that, I got this message:

"The update was not successful.

Please record the error code shown below and call Customer Service at (US numbers here). For UK customers, please call 0800 4962449

To resume using your Kindle, press the R key on your keyboard.

Update Error: 3"

So I pressed R and the Kindle started, and all looks OK.

Wondering now whether I should just revert the jailbreak hack? What did I do wrong - any ideas?

[FethryDuck]

Originally Posted by quimby

Ah, well, I got it back. Found the 15-second reset information and did that. When I did that, I got this message:

"The update was not successful.

Please record the error code shown below and call Customer Service at (US numbers here). For UK customers, please call 0800 4962449

To resume using your Kindle, press the R key on your keyboard.

Update Error: 3"

So I pressed R and the Kindle started, and all looks OK.

Wondering now whether I should just revert the jailbreak hack? What did I do wrong - any ideas?

The 15 seconds - reset ? Good work. An error message during install is ..ahum..somewhat normal. I would not revert anything yet. Are you screensaver working ? Some better expert then me may answer your question. Else, I have a growing suspicion that you have had success

NOTE: what ever you find on these pages, is dangerous, can easy harm your device, accidents happen, and when trouble strikes - you are mostly on your own.

[quimby]

FethryDuck - thanks for the reply. The screensavers weren't working, but, relieved that I could reset the device if necessary, I tried again. This time I saved my pictures as .png instead of .jpg, and the update worked. I have no idea whether I was just unlucky the first time, or whether the change in file format had an effect, but I'm happy to say I no longer have grumpy authors looking at me when the screensaver kicks in. :-)

[NiLuJe]

@quimby: That's the first I've heard of an update failing like that :/.

(Well, not exactly, there's a very few number of reports of things like that with official updates, but still, it's very, very, very uncommon, and more to the point, should *never* happen .).

The Error 3 on restart is completely normal, on the other hand . (The update process than run at the boot of the Kindle doesn't handle our custom update files).

Unlike official updates, killing the Kindle in the middle of the update proces with any of my hacks shouldn't leave the Kindle in a weird state, so you should be mostly good... (It'll probably leave some crap in the tmp folder, though, not sure if the boot process cleans up /tmp from time to time...)

My guess would be that, for some reason, your /tmp partition was full, and things went kablooey. What's strange is that the update process should handle these cases and fail, not lockup... But even that is somewhat strange, because the SS hack is not that big... :/

(Note that the number of custom SS you have doesn't change a thing, they're not part of the update process).

I'd very much like to take a look at your logs, see if something pops out...

(Type ;dumpMessages in the search box on Home screen, and attach the all_logs_as_of_* file created in the documents folder).

[quimby]

Hi NiLuJe; I've zipped the log up as it was larger than the 1MB forum limit. It's attached. I will be interested to see if you can figure out what happened.

thanks,

Julie

[NiLuJe]

@quimby: Got it, you can remove the attachment .

Okay, just to confirm:

You installed the jailbreak @ 12:21 (on your TimeZone, assuming your Kindle's clock is accurate).

You tried to install the SS Hack @ 13:03, all hell broke loose.

You tried again @ 15:16, it worked fine.

Is that it?

So, according to your logs, one of the daemon running on the Kindle (phd) crashed horribly before starting the update. Then things went weird, and the Kindle seemed stuck in a loop...

AFAICT, that's an issue completely unrelated to the hacks... :/

[quimby]

Timings are right, yes. I left it for ages before resetting the Kindle, as I was a bit nervous, being new to the Kindle. From when I tried to install the SS hack, it just sat there with no progress on the update progress bar. Don't know what the phd daemon does, or why it went silly. Never mind; thanks for having a look at the log. I do appreciate the hacks and I'm happy now the screensaver is working. :-)

[NiLuJe]

@quimby:

You never had any other weird issues with this Kindle? (framework restarts, crashes, lockups, USB/WiFi/Sleep issues, etc.). Because, yeah, that *really* shouldn't have happened on a sane device .

phd is the 'phone home daemon', never really checked all that stuff, but it's probably part of all the stuff handling whispernet & whispernet related sync/dl/ul with Amazon servers.

But in fact, after looking more carefully, it looks like it's pmond that locked up/crashed when stopping phd (pmond is the process monitor daemon, it starts/stops all the array of deamons used by Amazon on the Kindle, make sure they're always up & not using too much RAM, handles IPC, etc.).

And that starts a kind of infinite loop, because the switch to the updater runlevel itself continues, but most of the stuff that needs to be stopped after that relies on pmond to do so... And the updater itself *waits* for everything to be down before starting the actual update. That probably explains why your Kindle was still basically responding (ie. the kernel didn't crash), but the progress bar sayed at the start. The updater was waiting for pmond to stop stuff, but pmond had gone MIA. catch-22.

Did you unplug the usb cord at that point (~10 minutes after the blank progress bar), of was that a quirk of the messed up switch to updater? I imagine the bunch of usb plug/unplug that come after that (~15 mins) were really you trying to see if you could get it back to USB MS, but that first one is interesting...

On a slightly unrelated note, I'd recommend doing updates with wireless off, and usb unplugged, that may help avoid weird stuff like that.

[quimby]

No issues at all with it before this - but I've only had it a week. Yes, I did unplug from USB a couple of times, but I'm not sure exactly when. I'll bear in mind the WiFi/USB thing for next time I update, thanks.

[AceTracer]

I have the exact same problem, except my Kindle is wonky after the font hack was installed. I followed the jailbreaking instructions exactly, and all was fine. Then I followed the font hack instructions, and though the menus weren't working, I did the blank "boot" file thing and it was okay. Then I add the Arial Rounded Narrow font, and everything went to hell. Nothing worked right, when I tried to select books it told me that none of them were available. At this point I figured my best option was just uninstalling the font hack so I put the right uninstall file at the root, and did a hard reboot (because I still can't access the Settings screen).

When I hard rebooted, I get this screen.



So I'm stuck now. I can get back to the regular Kindle home screen, but I basically have a half-broken Kindle, which I assume Amazon won't be too happy to deal with. Any suggestions?

[AceTracer]

My logs are available here.

I am on a Kindle 3 (US 3G) running 3.0.3 software, all of this was done with OS X.

[NiLuJe]

@AceTracer: *Never* reboot a Kindle with a custom update file, it won't ever successfully install anything custom @ boot, and you'll end up on the nice screen shown on your screenshot.

If you need to disable the hack, and you still have access to the userstore over USB, just remove/rename the linkfonts/auto file, and restart.

Now, in order to fix the specific K3 issues with some fonts, either:

1/ Find a font that your Kindle will handle (As I can't reproduce this, I have no idea what exactly is the cause of this).
2/ Use the bci or autohint setting, and restart.
3/ Give up, disable the hack, restart, and uninstall it .

On a sidenote, you seem to have a few books that fail to index because of a wrong PID (apparently...), ASINs B002WGC8PU & B000FCK3X2

[AceTracer]

For the record, when I switched back to the fonts included in the src directory in the original font hack zip and rebooted, everything seems to work ok. I'm not too fond of these fonts though, which was the whole point.

I got the Arial Rounded Narrow font from this blog post. I figured any .ttf would work, but I guess not.

[AceTracer]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

On a sidenote, you seem to have a few books that fail to index because of a wrong PID (apparently...), ASINs B002WGC8PU & B000FCK3X2

Not sure what that means, but I did copy over some stuff from my old Kindle so I'm guessing that's it.

Anyway, thanks for the quick replies and info.