Kubrick: Live CD to debrick Kindle 3, 4, and Touch

[ixtab]

Because I cannot distinguish whether the flashing procedure completed successfully or unsuccessfully.

[Elancrom]

Many thanks ixtab and the other developers !!

I had a bricked Kindle 4 NT black v4.1.1. Run kubrick live CD. In the screen when flashing the firmware it told me FAILED in red word. Nevertheless in next screen I wiped all my data and format the partition (not jailbreak yet), next step instructions in diagnostics mode, and .... voilà .... the Kindle is working again !!

I am very grateful to you :-)

(sorry my poor english)

[SampleAndy]

Originally Posted by ixtab

...
Here's a Live Linux System for all the frustrated Windows users who are trying to debrick a Kindle and are struggling with Windows' inability to correctly determine and install device drivers. Or for people who just want to debrick a Kindle, without diving into all the internals. And actually - it might even be useful for people who are familiar with those internals.

If you like Kubrick:
I sincerely hope that you find Kubrick useful. If it helped you to solve your Kindle problem, you are more than welcome to donate a little something... but don't give your money to me. Please donate for a much more important cause, namely: for a Literacy project in Laos. You will make not only me happy. Thank you!

...

(sigh)

You've heard the saying that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, right? Well, that's me, with a little bit of knowledge. Without meaning to, I de-demoed my K4 demo. I mean, I MEANT to, but I'd hoped to learn what I was doing from the experience. Kubrick made the whole process a simple operation with almost no thought involved. So instead of having a K4 demo, I now have a fully functional, registered K4.

For most people that would be a good thing, but... I don't know a whole lot more than I did before. Can anyone help me RE-demo this device? I'd also like to save the demo software/OS/partition from my K-Touch before I start messing with it, too.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for any help.

[knc1]

Perhaps some individual kept a copy of the K4 demo firmware, but as a site, it has never been among the "recovery images" made available.

Your best bet for learning about what is being done is to look up the original "de-bricking" threads.
In those, people had to do all the commands "by hand" without any automation to help.

The Kubrick "Wizard" just (no offense intended ixtab) automates the process.
Making it much easier on the end-user but less informative.

The Kubrick LiveCD has most of those 'old' utilities already built and installed (has to, since the 'Wizard' uses them).
ixtab has include an escape from the 'Wizard' to the command line shell in Kubrick.
(Check his documentation - I don't recall what it is.)

[ixtab]

Originally Posted by knc1

Perhaps some individual kept a copy of the K4 demo firmware, but as a site, it has never been among the "recovery images" made available.

Your best bet for learning about what is being done is to look up the original "de-bricking" threads.
In those, people had to do all the commands "by hand" without any automation to help.

The Kubrick "Wizard" just (no offense intended ixtab) automates the process.
Making it much easier on the end-user but less informative.

The Kubrick LiveCD has most of those 'old' utilities already built and installed (has to, since the 'Wizard' uses them).
ixtab has include an escape from the 'Wizard' to the command line shell in Kubrick.
(Check his documentation - I don't recall what it is.)

Alt+F2 it is

But yeah, knc1 is absolutely right. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet kept a copy of the demo firmwares. One could extract it from a demo Kindle by starting Kubrick up to the point where usbnetwork is enabled, then switching to a full console, ssh'ing to the kindle and manually making backups of the main kernel and partitions 1,3, and 4. And one could restore these manually afterwards.

[SampleAndy]

Originally Posted by ixtab

Alt+F2 it is

I knew that! ... well, I remember reading it someplace.

Originally Posted by ixtab

But yeah, knc1 is absolutely right. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet kept a copy of the demo firmwares. One could extract it from a demo Kindle by starting Kubrick up to the point where usbnetwork is enabled, then switching to a full console, ssh'ing to the kindle and manually making backups of the main kernel and partitions 1,3, and 4. And one could restore these manually afterwards.

On my de-demoed K4
Actually, I got PMs from two users, one with a link to a file backup of p4, and one with a backup of p1 and a file backup of p4. It wasn't until just now that I realized that there was no backup of the kernel. Even if a demo kernel isn't different from a main kernel, there's still the possibility that the kernel and the partition ... wouldn't match... but if it's only a file backup instead of a partition backup... Sorry. One more brick wall of ignorance to run into.
Even if that were not a problem, isn't it possible that the demo needs information that's stored in p3?

On my still demoed KT
I let the Kubrick wizard run up to the point where the usbnetwork was enabled, and tried to login as root, but it didn't like the password mario. Is the wizard setup to calculate the password like the web password calculator does? I haven't had the chance to try fiona??? to see if that's the actual password or not. We'll find out after work today.

I hope you realize that I'm asking all these questions just to give you geniuses something new to think about, instead of the normal stuff.

[ixtab]

Originally Posted by SampleAndy

I let the Kubrick wizard run up to the point where the usbnetwork was enabled, and tried to login as root, but it didn't like the password mario. Is the wizard setup to calculate the password like the web password calculator does? I haven't had the chance to try fiona??? to see if that's the actual password or not. We'll find out after work today.

Interesting. Unless I'm totally wrong, the password is mario. But you can also use the private key in resources/ssh_keys/id_kdebrick. That's what Kubrick itself uses to run commands on the Kindle without being asked for a password. (Here's an example).

[SampleAndy]

Originally Posted by ixtab

Interesting. Unless I'm totally wrong, the password is mario. But you can also use the private key in resources/ssh_keys/id_kdebrick. That's what Kubrick itself uses to run commands on the Kindle without being asked for a password. (Here's an example).

Even the example didn't help. I'm totally at a loss here. I'm pretty sure that my first mistake was trying to run it from inside ssh... which is on the device, right? Then, after exiting ssh, I looked for a resources directory on the Kubrick system. I don't know if that was a mistake or not, but I didn't find one. Back into ssh and surprise, framework isn't allowed access to /etc/shadow.

The instructions in the wiki at step 7 seem pretty clear, but... not to me. (shrugs)

(do you think we should break this out into another thread, instead of confusing issues in this one?)

[knc1]

Originally Posted by SampleAndy

Back into ssh and surprise, framework isn't allowed access to /etc/shadow.

If you do an:

ls -l /etc/shadow

you will see the permissions, owner and group assignments.

With the probable result of something like:

-rw-r----- 1 root shadow 1329 2013-04-12 14:34 /etc/shadow

That is a 'flag' character and three sets (owner, group, others) of permissions (read, write, execute).

In the above case, that file's owner is 'root', the owner is allowed to read or write to it.
That file allows access by the members of the group 'shadow' although the access is limited to read (no write or execute).

Users not a member of the shadow group (who are not 'root' - 'root' can do anything) are prohibited any access to the file.


Which (if this where a Kindle file, not my desktop) would mean the user named 'framework' (a member of 'others' in this case).

- - - - -

If anyone finds the above confusing - -
Then just be glad the Kindles aren't running SeLinux.

[ixtab]

Jump start:

1. Read this entire post before continuing, and make sure that you have everything you need.
2. Run Kubrick until where it asks you to enable USB network, and enable it. Wait for Kubrick to "turn green", but don't continue with the wizard.
3. Press Alt+F2 and login as root (no password)
4. cd /media/cdrom/kubrick/
5. ssh -i resources/ssh_keys/id_kdebrick root@192.168.15.244
6. You'll now have an interactive shell on the Kindle.

To make backups of the partitions, you can follow the instructions here.

You should be running the "host-side" commands in a directory that will write to permanent storage, so either boot Kubrick from a USB stick and save stuff to /media/usbstick or a subdirectory, or plug in and mount an additional hard disk/USB stick, and store it there. You'll need an additional console for that, so use Alt+F3 on the computer.

To extract the kernel, you can use getkernels.sh. Store that file on your "permanent storage" before starting the whole Kubrick procedure. To be on the safe side, only use it after making a the backup of mmcblk0p4. That is, scp it to root@192.168.15.244:/mnt/us/, then execute it on the Kindle, and of course, don't forget to also copy the output back from the Kindle to your permanent storage.

[SampleAndy]

Originally Posted by ixtab

Jump start:

after about 20 typos from spinning around from my normal computer back to the one running Kubrick, I'm in.

Originally Posted by ixtab

To make backups of the partitions, you can follow the instructions here.
...
You should be running the "host-side" commands in a directory that will write to permanent storage, so either boot Kubrick from a USB stick and save stuff to /media/usbstick or a subdirectory, or plug in and mount an additional hard disk/USB stick, and store it there. You'll need an additional console for that, so use Alt+F3 on the computer.

What I was going to try was:
dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p1 of=/mnt/base-us/KTD/mmcblk0p1.bin where KTD was a directory that I'd created before. According to the instructions, the root partition should be around 350M, p3 is around 32M and I've already flashed p2, so it doesn't matter. 382M should be next to nothing to the user partition, right?

If that works, I'll worry about the kernels tomorrow. I've got WAAAYY too many other things I have to do.

[SampleAndy]

Originally Posted by ixtab

To extract the kernel, you can use getkernels.sh. Store that file on your "permanent storage" before starting the whole Kubrick procedure. To be on the safe side, only use it after making a the backup of mmcblk0p4. That is, scp it to root@192.168.15.244:/mnt/us/, then execute it on the Kindle, and of course, don't forget to also copy the output back from the Kindle to your permanent storage.

The fact that both of my PM guides gave me a file backup of the user partition (p4) led me to believe that I didn't need to backup the entire partition. My file backup of p4 came to 308M, where a full partition backup would be close to 2G. Is there something necessary about the user partition? That's where I got confused back in post 561. You'd said someplace that it was essential that the main partition and the main kernel match and the diag partition and the diag kernel match, but someplace else I'd read that you could just destroy (somehow) p4 and the Kindle would recreate it on the next boot. (sigh)

Thanks for being patient with me so far. I really appreciate it.

[ixtab]

Well - I simply don't know if the user partition is important or not on demo Kindles. I also doubt it, but you never know. Making a backup of the full disk image is simply the most conservative (literally!) option, because it's a bit-identical copy.

BTW, once you have everything together, please send me a PM so I can grab a copy of the files. I'd be interested in taking a look at them, if only to see how they differ from the production ones.

[SampleAndy]

Originally Posted by ixtab

Well - I simply don't know if the user partition is important or not on demo Kindles. I also doubt it, but you never know. Making a backup of the full disk image is simply the most conservative (literally!) option, because it's a bit-identical copy.

BTW, once you have everything together, please send me a PM so I can grab a copy of the files. I'd be interested in taking a look at them, if only to see how they differ from the production ones.

OK... I've got two options here. I have a 32G USB drive and there's a 500G hard drive in the computer I'm using as a terminal. Sooo all I'd need to do would be to mount the one of the drives and go back to your instructions. I tried to mount the hard drive, but between not having the slightest idea what I was doing and... I guess that's enough, isn't it. Could you please give me the instructions to mount the USB drive? It's currently formatted as FAT32. Would that work OK? It'd be a lot easier to get the files into my real world from there. The hard drive has Mint linux installed in whatever format it wanted to use. That's where I'd planned to learn to stand... or maybe crawl into the linux world.

OK. Just popped the USB drive in and it was right there in /media/usbdisk... I think. We'll see what happens.

(is there a BB code for strikeout?)

Get you copies? After all your help, it would be the least I could do.

[dsmid]

Originally Posted by ixtab

Well - I simply don't know if the user partition is important or not on demo Kindles. I also doubt it, but you never know.

The user partition of K4 demo contains lot of interesting stuff (demo books etc.)
I doubt the demo mode would work without it.