Troubleshooting Kindle Touch - No books on home screen: Bug, or Amazon?

[viragored]

TLDR: Kindle Touch, connects to wifi for first time in years, all books vanish from the home screen. Any tips, clues, suggestions?
Full story below...

I've had a Kindle Touch for about 10 years. Early on I applied the Jailbreak and Cover Screen hack (exactly how is now lost in the mists of time). The Kindle worked fine up to a couple of weeks ago - when I connected to wifi for the first time since the early days.

Now that Amazon will only send books to the Kindle and not download/USB transfer, I wanted to load the dozen or so books I'd bought recently. I used the Amazon 'Devices and Content' web page to select them. They seemed to download successfully - but the home screen showed no books. Both Calibre and Windows explorer showed that the 100 or so books previously on the Kindle were still there, in the author-based folder structure. The books just downloaded were in the Kindle, but as single files in the root folder and not imported/indexed into the folders.

I've tried all combinations of the filters - Device/Cloud, All Items/Books, Latest/Author/Title. And still the number of items is shown as 0.

The various attempts I've made to get things working again include:

• Reboot the Kindle, both from the home screen/Settings menu and from long-press the power button (several times)
• Reload the firmware (which was and still is 5.3.7.3, the latest supported for Kindle Touch)
• Reset the Kindle (twice) from the home screen/Settings menu so device is "factory fresh" with no Jailbreak, etc.

After the first reset, I loaded some books onto the Kindle from Calibre. They appeared on the home screen, as expected. And then they disappeared from the home screen again after I'd finished one book and gone back to the home screen. Then I connected to the wifi, intending to download again the books that had been removed by the reset - and the Kindle started loading empty collections, over 40 of them, that did appear on the home page. I turned off the wifi, deleted the collections and still had no books on the home page.

After the second reset I again loaded some books from Calibre and started reading another book. All was going well, all the books I'd loaded were still showing on the home page after some days. To get more books from Amazon I tapped the Cloud option on the home page, which popped up a list of almost 1000 books (presumably all I've got in my Amazon account) - with the wifi off. Then I connected the wifi, selected one book which downloaded successfully and opened for reading.
And that's when all the books again disappeared from the home screen.

The books are there because a home screen search can find them, and then take me to the book.

So I'm wondering if this is a bug linked to wifi connection, there's an issue with the amount of processing the software needs to do after a reset, or the Kindle is being sabotaged by Amazon because of books coming in from Calibre.
Anyone got any suggestions?

[mergen3107]

Vaguely sounds like storage failure. Do a simple test. Connect Kindle to PC and drop a simple empty file 123.txt. Unplug Kindle and restart it. Plug in again - is the file still there?

[viragored]

Originally Posted by mergen3107

Vaguely sounds like storage failure. Do a simple test. Connect Kindle to PC and drop a simple empty file 123.txt. Unplug Kindle and restart it. Plug in again - is the file still there?

Thanks for the suggestion. Hardware failure was not something I had thought of.

To test, I put one empty .txt file in the root directory and another in the documents directory. Restarted from the menu and both files are still there.

So no immediate evidence of a memory failure.

Would reformatting with Kubrick be a good idea?
At the moment, using this Kindle with no usable homepage is a pretty dire experience so there wouldn't be much to lose with a fresh start.

[mergen3107]

I would suggest trying to deregister it and then login with Amazon again, first.
The issue is quite weird

[mergen3107]

Also, try to see if your older machine can actually boot into Kubrick in the first place. Kubrick is so old that it only supports legacy boot BIOS’es (pre UEFI era)

[viragored]

Originally Posted by mergen3107

Also, try to see if your older machine can actually boot into Kubrick in the first place. Kubrick is so old that it only supports legacy boot BIOS’es (pre UEFI era)

Thanks - good tips. Having failed to find anyone with similar symptoms I did wonder if it would be something to do with this Kindle. I'd like to keep away from Amazon until all other options have been tried so I'll go for Kubrick first.

It'll take me a while to dig out the old, old PC and fire it up. It did boot from Kubrick a decade ago so I hope all the bits inside the box will still be working after several years of hibernation.