Kindle Touch (5.0.0) bricked, no USB - what's to blame?

[Poetcop]

Hey folks, my Kindle Touch is now showing the bootup logo, with the tree and the words Kindle, and does not respond to any button presses. (holding the power button for 20 s makes the green light flash, after which pressing it again causes a flash of white and black screen and then return to the book screen) When connected to my Mac via USB it appears to charge but does not mount a drive. I have no idea what event happened to get it into this state: it was about an hour after connecting to wifi and downloading a book from amazon, then disconnecting from wifi and putting it to sleep (by a single power button press). It was about half charged. I've been reading Rastik's thread over and over, but as a less technically skilled user I'm having trouble figuring out how I can follow in his footsteps to unbrick. I'd appreciate any help with that.

Also important, I'd like to know what caused this. Although I accepted that bricking the device, perhaps for good, was a possibility, I was under the impression that all the modifications I made were relatively low-risk. If one of them could cause bricking, we should publicize that. Here's what I did, in order:

- Used Yifan Lu's mp3 jailbreak.
- Installed usbnet, changing the root password in the process.
- Installed Yifan Lu's screensaver hack, 2nd version, and about 1.4 MB of different image files.
- Successfully ssh'ed in and looked around, just using cat etc. Deleted the log files in /var/local/log/, that is wpa_suplicant*, netlog*, and messages*, after copying them to ~.
- Ran kindlesec.sh, the latest version from github, the text of which I've appended to this message.

So I did not do any editing of config files etc at all, only running these scripts and doing normal Kindle user activities. It was working great for more than a week after the last of these changes. Which of them might have been the culprit? Some more information that might be relevant: unlike in OS X, in Windows XP the operating system responds to plugging in the Kindle, recognizing it as a USB device, specifically "USB Mass Storage Device Location 0 (Amazon Kindle)" Also a Removable Disk shows up called D:, but when I double click it has the message: "Please insert a disk into drive D:"

I'd be very grateful for hints to get me going. Even if I can get a replacement Kindle, I don't think I would want to use an unjailbroken one where the logs can be read by Amazon.

kindlesec.sh that I ran:

#!/bin/sh

PATHS="/usr/sbin/syslog-ng
/usr/sbin/loginfo
/usr/sbin/tinyrot
/usr/bin/showlog"

backup() {
echo "Creating backup of loginfo, tinyrot, otaup, showlog, syslog-ng."
mkdir "/mnt/us/.kindlesec/"

for files in $PATHS
do
#creates backup of original file to /mnt/us/.kindlesec
cp $files /mnt/us/.kindlesec/
done
}

null_link() {
echo "Pointing log scripts to /dev/null"
echo
for paths in $PATHS
do
#creates symlink and backup to $PATH
ln -s -b /dev/null $paths
done
echo
exit 0
}

backup
null_link

[thatworkshop]

welcome to the club of brickedfoolness
(Not that I'm not sorry for what happened to you but well better to smile and be patient.)

The culprits in order of likelihood are:
1. kindlesec.sh
2. ss image change

If you searched, you'd have found this:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=167118

[JustAMan]

Apparently you're just another person who bricked his/her device using this "stop-logs" script. I wonder in the first place why do you ever want to disable these system logs?..
If you want some security just go to next thread about "chatty kathy", that's much more meaningful IMHO than breaking this system logging stuff.

[Poetcop]

Thanks for your replies, and I apologize for starting this as a new thread - I thought the problems described in the "Bricked Kindle Touch" thread were different from mine, but upon rereading mine sound exactly like those of Crevecoeur, zcat, and cskat. It seems very plausible that the log file manipulation is to blame, and I'm very glad Geekmaster posted the warning on the Big Brother thread about kindlesec and similar approaches having the potential to brick (it would have saved me some grief). I'm going to be eagerly following these threads for ideas about how this things can be saved. I'm a big fan of the Kindle Touch, and with another solution to the logging issue - thanks for pointing me to the Chatty Kathy approach, JustAMan, it sounds inherently safer.

[geekmaster]

I have posted this to various threads discussing bricked kindles. There are a number of ways to fix your kindle as discussed in the forums, but a simple and reliable method is being developed. Read this:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=407

Please give yifanlu some time to work on this project without distractions. Thanks.

In the mean time, if you want to invest the effort to learn existing recovery methods, check out ixtab's jailbreak. You can do some repairs from his runme.sh script. Please do not do anything to cause more damage to your kindle file system. It would be better to wait. Also, read the wiki's for the K4NT and for the Touch.

[Poetcop]

Thanks geekmaster, your messages here and in the other thread give me a lot of hope (not to mention Yifan Lu, who is our Kindle Touch superhero). No runme.sh for me - I don't know how to communicate with the device at all in this state.*But perhaps something like the USB recovery mode you mentioned will be the answer. All I can do is wait and send my good wishes!

[dasmoover]

Kindlesec was written for the Kindle 3 and is NOT INTENDED FOR USE ON ANY OTHER MODEL.

[Poetcop]

Thanks for this information dasmoover, I guess I must have seen it on the gitbrew page but figured since that part of the filesystem *appeared* the same, it should work the same. So I apologize for badmouthing your solution, it seems to be my fault for putting it on the Touch. I really appreciate the work you put into this privacy issue, which is critically important one to me.

By the by, do you have any thoughts as to why disabling those 4 scripts, syslog-ng, loginfo, tinyrot, and showlog, might have bricked a Kindle Touch? Like, do you think the problem is caused directly by the scripts being linked to /dev/null, or a side effect of them not running? The fact that mine didn't fail immediately but after a week is compatible with the idea that a log directory might be getting filled up by some surviving process, and not cleared out as it should be... I'm interested in whether this basic approach to stopping logging might work for the Kindle Touch with modifications, or whether we'll have to use one of the alternative approaches.

[JustAMan]

Maybe its tinyrot that stopped some log from rotating that filled your /var/local. It's only 30 MB on KTouch, you know...

[dasmoover]

@Poetcop,

Quite alright, everyone has a right to their opinion, its a very short shell script. I am working on a fullproof method to prevent logging with support for the Kindle Touch. I am sorry that you've had the misfortune of running into this problem.

[Poetcop]

I'm glad to hear that dasmoover, it's such important work. JustAMan, I'm very tempted to jump to that conclusion as well: if the Touch has an additional log being generated, that wasn't stopped by kindlesec, and now not rotated out by tinyrot, maybe my Kindle crashed because it's full. I'm choosing to interpret that as good news, because it means all I need to do to unbrick my Kindle is to delete those files - somehow. Really hoping that more information about how to use those alternative USB modes comes out soon, and that they aren't also flummoxed by a full hard drive.

[geekmaster]

My debricking status using USB (HID) Recovery mode and fastboot:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=29