Kobo Wi-Fi crashing while booting

[Bosconian]

I finally took a closer look on a wrecked Kobo Wi-Fi from a friend. When pushing the power button or connecting it to an active USB port it starts and then crashes while booting. After the power LED going on and off again it shows the boot screen with the logo and a progress bar. In the progress bar seven black boxes appear one after the other, then the display stays frozen like this. No paper-clip or factory reset seems to work since it also crashes when I try.
I wanted to replace the firmware via desktop application but that instantly reboots my host machine when it connects to the device. (I have yet to try another windows machine. Wine on Linux doesn't work.)

Now I would like to try to boot it from SD card - but now the problem is that I can't get my hands on a firmware image. All the links I've been able to dig out are broken and OpenInkpot also has nothing in store for my board (there's something for eb600, but not for eb600e).
Can somebody give me a firmware image for my device or point me to a source that I've not been able to find?