Kindle files keep returning "from the grave"

[davehallett]

Well in the end I weighed the choices and decided to go to Amazon first, partly because even if Kubricking the device fixed it, I'm not sure I would still trust it. And partly because this problem is so strange I think they ought to know about it.

So I was on the phone for an hour with a very pleasant and likeable guy and we established that you also can't upgrade the software (it appears to work fine, but on reboot nothing has changed) and that any books I add also disappear on reboot, as you might expect, and that no-one in his office has ever heard of such a thing before.

Waiting for them to look over the logs and get back to me now (probably Tuesday), but if I ever learn more, I'll be sure to let you all know. Thanks very much for your time and attention.

[twobob]

Well.. I can think of at least two times I heard of it..

Perhaps I could get a job in their office

Best of luck.

[davehallett]

His email says he's passed the case to the technical team.

If they haven't heard of it, I'll send them your way

[alanHd]

Originally Posted by davehallett

His email says he's passed the case to the technical team.

If they haven't heard of it, I'll send them your way

I sometimes wonder why amazon dont come knocking at the doors of the developers on here.

Their patches make a good product great.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by davehallett

So I was on the phone for an hour with a very pleasant and likeable guy and we established that you also can't upgrade the software (it appears to work fine, but on reboot nothing has changed)

This just *has* to be an MMC controller fault. It can't be the filesystem, if updates to both fat and the Kindle's Linux-formatted system filesystems are both failing.

I suspect the cause of the weird 'comes back after reboot' symptoms are simply that the Kindle thinks it's making changes, is updating appropriate in-memory data structures (dcache and the like) and issuing write requests to the flash... and nothing is being written. I suspect that if you bought a new book, read some of it, then read a bunch of other stuff or did a reindex to make it likely that the caches emptied, that reading the book again would crash because it would try to read the book in off the flash, but it never got there. This doesn't show up so much for deleted files because if you delete something there is less call for the kernel to try to read in data that it thinks is gone, only to find that it isn't.

(It might also be interesting to see if USB-transferring something in works. Probably not -- I suspect that if the flash is ignoring writes from the kernel, that it's also ignoring writes over the USB bridge controller chip...)

[davehallett]

Thanks for your thoughts. I don't know enough about the Kindle to judge the detail, but this seems to match pretty well with my experience.

I've moved files on to the disk by USB and it appears to work, but I don't think they stay after a reboot either.

If Amazon seem baffled, I will send them your thoughts!