[WIP][HOW TO][UNBRICK][HARD-BRICK][KF2]Bringing your KF2 back from the dead

Next Step?

Wanna try this with my bricked kf 2nd gen. But I need to research more on it first...

On what state will the tablet be when you plug in the finished product to the computer?

can you please put the next steps ?

Thanks!

What's next??

Hello there... I was reading your steps to repair my dead KF2 on your post... and I noticed you said on the requirements that we need a Linux PC, preferably with Ubuntu, to proceed... but There are no more steps after you show how to solder.

Can you tell me, please, What's next? What happens when I connect the logic board with the soldered wires to the SD adapter, to the linux PC? how do I revive it?

Please, help me... I want to give that Kindle as a gift to someone on my church who needs it, And I want to try to fix it!!

Thanks for your time and sharing your knowledge. God bless you.

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kurohyou said:

This guide is a work in progress.
Please be patient as I work on completing this guide, as I work full time and am a full time student.
You can find the original discussion thread for this topic here!

DISCLAIMER: I am not responsible for any damage to yourself, your Kindle, or other property incurred by following any or all parts of this guide. Proceed at your own risk.

WARNING: Do not attempt to follow this guide unless you are fairly familiar with soldering and Linux commands. Serious harm to yourself, your Kindle, and/or your computer can result if you are not careful.

Q. What devices will this work on?
A. This how-to works for the Kindle Fire 2 only. (There are other methods of restoring a bricked original Kindle Fire; refer to the FAQ for that device)

Q. Why won't this work for KFHD7"/8.9"?
A. The motherboard designs for the KFHDs are different. That means that the entire process of finding all the solder points for those motherboards (including desoldering the e-MMC) has to be repeated before the same method for fixing hard-bricks on them can be used. (Note: If you have a hard-bricked or otherwise broken KFHD7"/8.9" that you'd be willing to donate for this endeavor, please PM me)

Q. Under what circumstance does will this guide help?
A. This guide is intended to restore the KF2 that was previously thought to be beyond restoring, or hard-bricked, as a result of flashing the incorrect image to your ROM. This means a KF2 that does not display anything on the screen and does not light up the power LED when the power button is pressed (i.e. it appears dead even after charging). If your KF2 still shows signs of life but is not working, please try one of the other methods of repairing it. Might I suggest Q16-23 of the FAQ?

Q. Is there any way to do this without all the soldering?
A. At this time, no; however, I am in the process of developing a device to do this that does not require soldering.

Q. I don't feel comfortable doing this myself. Can I have you fix it for me?
A. Send me a PM and we'll work out the details.

Required materials:

Hard-bricked Kindle Fire 2
USB SD card reader (one with only one slot, NOT the multi-card readers)*
30 AWG wire (I found mine at Radioshack)
solder (the smaller the diameter, the better)
soldering iron (pencil iron will work, but soldering station is better)
plastic opening tools
a small Phillips screwdriver (mine came with my plastic opening tool kit)
a computer with Linux (a live CD of a distro should theoretically work, but I used an installed copy of Ubuntu 13.04)

*For cheap card readers near me (literally three blocks up the road), I found this one from Microcenter and this one from Tigerdirect. Go with whatever is cheapest for you.​

Suggested materials:

Helping hands tool
A good light source
Magnifying glass/magnifying visor (I used a x7 magnifying glass with built-in light)
Desoldering pump/wick (in case you mess something up, need to desolder the SD card reader, or want to clean up your board after you're done)
Lots of patience​

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Once you have a Linux PC up and running or even just a Ubuntu live is will do, download the boot loader for your kindle, I don't have links at the moment, but one place you can get it is download the latest official update for your device from Amazon's support section, I am pretty sure Linux should automatically recognize it as a zip file even though it ends in .bin, if not just changes the end to .zip. Extract the file called u-boot.bin to wherever you find convenient, for my convenience I will say extract to the home folder( the terminals default to that directory so it makes things simpler). Now plug in the USB adapter you have soldered to the kindle. If it mounts anything I suggest unmounting it just to be on the over protective side. You will now need to determine the device path that is given to the kindles emmc, easiest way is to check in gparted or disks, or by running the mount command from a terminal if you haven't yet unmounted the other partitions and know what you are looking for. Once it has been determined you should run a command similar to this in a terminal: take note to replace sdb2 with the device name your PC assigned to the device, but remember to leave the 2 so it only flashes that to the second partition instead of over the entire emmc. Once you run this and it succeeds, you should eject the device or just shut the PC down, disconnect your wires and try powering on the kindle. @kurohyou did I leave anything important out? I will probably make this formatted better later on when I am actually on a PC.

Sent from my Amazon Kindle Fire HD running CM10.1 Tablet UI using xda-developers app

super！
but if you know how the AMAZON lab126 guys fix it you will know it‘s very easy
y.

Yes but they have signed files we don't have access to that are necessary for reflashing it with usbboot/aboot or w/e that utility is called.

Sent from my Amazon Kindle Fire HD running CM10.1 Tablet UI using xda-developers app

Has anyone managed to write up a walk through on exactly what to do once you've gotten the board soldered up and ready to go? I have Linux up and running, and the soldering shouldn't take more than 20 minutes, but I'm holding off on doing this until I know I can do the software side of things. I am a complete noob with linux, and don't want to make things worse by making a mistake. Part of me really wants to try this out but not knowing what to do after I'm wired up keeps me from trying this.

Some great news!

First off, a very big thank you to @kurohyou and @stunts513 for all their efforts, all their suggestions in all their posts helped me get to the end, thank you guys!

Right, here's my story, had a Kindle Fire 2 flashed with the wrong bootloader a few months back, forgot about the device till 2 days back when i came across the
original post by kurohyou, with the idea of getting direct access to the eMMC and flashing the bootloader, then followed up on his post with the how to's, decided to
give it a shot.

Started off with the soldering on the Kindle motherboard, it was a pain, but what helped in attaching the solder to the points was a good paste, i used solder paste on
the points, then dabbed a little solder with flux on the tip of the soldering iron and kept the tip on the point for a few seconds at a time, sometimes more than once,
once all the points were tinted, i tinted the ends of the cables i was going to use with the same solder with flux, the cables i used were from an old HDMI cable which
i stripped up, they were thin and flexible. For the SD card reader, i used one similar to kurohyou's, except i didn't have the points on the other side, so i soldered
the cables directly to the legs of the SD reader slot without removing the slot, also, i did not short ground and CD_SW, instead i just left a blank SD adapter in the
slot, which did the trick.

Now once everything was soldered on, i used the ubuntu-12.04.3-desktop-i386.iso to create a UBUNTU live CD and booted from that, once in UBUNTU attached the SD reader
and voila, eMMC detected! Now to get to the flashing of the bootloader, i read a numerous amount of posts suggesting to flash the u-boot.bin file from the original
Kindle firmware, and the suggested version was the 10.2.4, so i downloaded the firmware (in .bin format) from the amazon site, right clicked on the file, open with,
used Winrar, there extracted the u-boot.bin file. To flash the bootloader i used the dd command suggested by stunts513, which was:

sudo dd bs=1 if=u-boot.bin of=/dev/sdb2

The first time i ran that command, i had an input/output error, i ran the command another 3 or 4 times till it flashed successfully, i got an error message when
ejecting the SD, so shut down the machine, detached the SD reader and connected up the Kindle, no life, tried usb, fastboot and mains charger, no signs of life.
Disconnected everything and attached the SD reader again, now UBUNTU recognized the eMMC, but as 1 disk with no partitions! So thought ok, il reboot the system and try
again, tried all the different USB slots i had on the laptop, all giving the same result, so i left the SD reader out for a few minutes, while i figured out what to do
next, then when i re-attached it, it picked it up again with all the correct partitions, however, nothing was mounted, i read stunts513's suggestion of unmounting to
be safe, so i though that was fine, ran the dd command again and same thing, input/output error, tried a few times and it flashed successfully, again detached and
connected up the Kindle, no signs of life, didn't really know what to do next, decided to ponder on the Kindle folder i had on my drive, with the backups, there i found 'otter2-u-boot-prod-10.2.4' which was 227KB, the same size as u-boot.bin, thought lets give this file a go, again reconnected up till all the partitions were detected correctly and ran the dd command with otter2-u-boot-prod-10.2.4.bin, detached everything and connect the Kindle up, plugged in the USB and got an orange light!

A few people got the orange light without the kindle actually booting the OS, so never had my hopes up too high, let the kindle charge for a few mins and then it started up, stuck on the kindle logo boot loop, as i started reading the forum, i came across a post about the kindle boot loop, where stunts513 suggested flashing via fast boot, i attached the kindle to the fast boot cable and was waiting for the laptop to recognize the kindle, suddenly i get a blank screen, i left it like that for a few minutes then decided to press the power button, no response, i kept the power button pressed in till i saw the kindle logo again, took a few seconds but this time, it booted the OS! I don't know if the fast boot cable had anything to do with that, im sure stunts513 and kurohyou will be able to shed some more light on that.

My apologies for the long post, but im trying to put down as much detail as possible to help all the other guys with the bricked Kindle fire 2's, im also attaching the boot file i used.

Again, a big thank you to kurohyou and stunts513 for all their efforts!

Bit of an interesting one if anyone could try and shed some light onto it. Connect everything up as usual but with VccQ every time it is connected something must short and fries the SD card reader, without VccQ connected the light on the SD card adaptor flashes continually but it's not recognised by Ubuntu.

Thank you!

I just wanted to drop by and say a HUGE thank you to @kurohyou for starting this thread and for all who have contributed to it

BEFORE I CONTINUE, PLEASE BE MINDFUL THAT THE PARTITION NUMBER/DESIGNATION BEING SHOWN AND WRITTEN TO IN THIS THREAD, BY MYSELF AND OTHER PEOPLE, WILL NOT NECESSARILY BE THE SAME WHEN YOU CONNECT YOUR KINDLE eMMC TO YOUR SD CARD READER AND FLASH THE CORRECT BOOTLOADER, TO DE-BRICK IT. LINUX ASSIGNS DIFFERENT PARTITION NODES BASED ON VARIOUS CRITERIA, SO YOU MUST ALWAYS ENSURE YOU ARE "dd'ing" TO THE CORRECT PARTITION, OTHERWISE YOU COULD BE WRITING TO *ANY* DEVICE ON YOUR PC, POSSIBLY YOUR MULTIPLE TERABYTE FAMILY PHOTO ARCHIVE... ARGH! DO *ALWAYS* ENSURE YOU ARE WRITING TO A 256KB PARTITION - REFER TO MY PHOTOS, BELOW; THEY SHOW A PARTITION LISTING AND WHERE THE BOOTLOADER PARTITION IS, AND IN WHICH ORDER THE PARTITIONS ARE.

I bought a pristine, boxed *DEMO* Kindle (2? Gen 2? "Otter2" anyway the 7" one, 600x1024) from eBay for just £6.99, and when I tried to flash the bootloader with my fastboot cable, as soon as I rebooted... it DIED. Being a long time qualified electronics engineer, this kind of disassembley is all part of life for me, and doesn't phase me one iota, but the soldering of wires is a VERY precise and delicate operation - PROCEED VERY VERY SLOWLY, DOUBLE CHECK AND THEN AGAIN, ALL YOUR PIN DESIGNATIONS AND SOLDER JOINTS OR THERE'LL BE TEARS BEFORE BEDTIME!

Anyhow, I simply booted into 32 bit Ubuntu (I have a huge repository of ISOs to hand, so that was no big deal, and bash commands I can do in my sleep) so I flashed the bootloader to the relevant unmounted partition @mohibr attached to this post: http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=49549083&postcount=13

... using "dd" command, et VOILA! it works! (I knew it would, this is hardly rocket science, but still an extremely joyful moment to behold, seeing my less-than-one-day-old KF revived!)

I'm rather too tired to expand thoroughly on all the details, but if anyone needs any help, let me know soon before this whole episode is lost and forgotten (you've no idea HOW much of this kind of thing I do weekly, to myriad devices).

Here's my witness photos - please feel free to add me to the testimonys of people who took their time and revived their KF(2? not sure that it's a "2", just that it's a later version using "otter2", whatever that pertains to.)

Photos---> https://www.flickr.com/photos/22008695@N03/albums/72157660358184524

Thank you so much, and God bless you all and have a lovely Christmas

Matthew.

Vcc location on mobo?

Trying to find a Vcc point on the fire gen2 mobo. multimeter took a crap and im getting scary readings. anyone have a picture of location so i can short to ground. My gen2 is currently stuck at "boot, then blackscreen". its not a loop and windows doesnt recognize the device at all.

Any pictures of the location would be greatly appreciated. ciao.

On a side note, i apologize for reviving this thread. I accidentally flashed a zipped boot image to my kindle. its been sitting for a few weeks. just finally ordered a fastboot cable.