Can't Access Kindle

[mwfogleman]

When I try to connect my Linux machine (Arch) to my Kindle Paperwhite (1st Generation), I receive errors like this one:

calibre, version 1.27.0
ERROR: Error: Error communicating with device

'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 19: invalid continuation byte

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/device.py", line 86, in run
self.result = self.func(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/gui2/device.py", line 490, in _books
mainlist = self.device.books(oncard=None, end_session=False)
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/devices/kindle/driver.py", line 339, in books
bl = USBMS.books(self, oncard=oncard, end_session=end_session)
File "/usr/lib/calibre/calibre/devices/usbms/driver.py", line 215, in books
for path, dirs, files in os.walk(ebook_dir):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/os.py", line 284, in walk
if isdir(join(top, name)):
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py", line 80, in join
path += '/' + b
UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode byte 0xf1 in position 19: invalid continuation byte

I know there are other threads on this site that mention this problem, but none have a solution. Someone suggested it might have to do with a specific title of a certain book, or even several books. However, running Calibre in debug mode gives a similar / identical error, and so I can't, as suggested, figure out whether this is the problem, or which book has the problematic title.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[kovidgoyal]

list the files on your kindle

find /media/Kindle (or whatever)

then delete the one that has bogus bytes in its filename.

And if you cannot find the file by inspecting the list, use this one-liner

calibre-debug -c "from calibre import walk; files = [f.decode('utf-8', 'replace') for f in walk(b'/media/Kindle')]; print b'\n'.join(f.encode('utf-8') for f in files if u'\ufffd' in f)"

Replace /media/Kindle above with the path to your kindle.

[mwfogleman]

I ran this command, tried to remove the related files, and have mucked things up so that Calibre won't start. (Oh no!)

When I run calibre-debug -g, it says:
calibre 1.27 isfrozen: False is64bit: False
Linux-3.13.5-1-ARCH-i686-with-glibc2.0 Linux ('32bit', 'ELF')
('Linux', '3.13.5-1-ARCH', '#1 SMP PREEMPT Sun Feb 23 00:10:07 CET 2014')
Python 2.7.6
Linux: ('', '', '')

[mwfogleman]

OK, I take it back. I restarted my laptop, ran Calibre (and it worked, phew!), mounted my Kindle, and now everything seems to be in working order.

One last concern: all of the files with "bad bytes" were from Amazon's Send-to-Kindle feature. Is there any way I can prevent this from happening in the future, if I continue to use the service?

[kovidgoyal]

Make sure your kindle is mounted with whatever the correct codepage is for its FAT32 filesystem. I'm afraid the details for how to do that depend on your linux distro.