Recover Pocketbook 611 e-book

A brief plot of the previous series : / “Yesterday I was left with a dead Pocketbook e-book on e-Ink, model 611 <....> Now I’m looking for an image from the working memory card’s internal memory card to fill it with the one under consideration and finally find out , is this dead state due to an update failure, or is it a problem in device components "



And now a new series:





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How to restore Pocketbook 611 Obreey with the help of a frying pan, soldering iron, GFR, SD adapter <-microSD and Pocketbook programmer (respect him)? Under the cut.



The state before the following actions:







As follows from the previous post, immediately after the publication, Mikhail Boyko, a Pocketbook programmer, contacted me (on his own initiative!). Mikhail offered assistance in restoring the device, and immediately gave 6 valuable recommendations, using which the first results were obtained:

1. If possible, look at the voltage on the battery. If you charged it, then there should be more than 4.0 volts. If there is 3.6 something bad, if 3.2 or less, then this is very bad.

Good advice. Sorry there was nothing to check. But in the end, the battery was not to blame

2. Try to disconnect the battery. Wait a couple of minutes, make sure that the USB cable and the battery are disconnected, and short-circuit the 2 terminals on the power connector with a metal object. If there is a tester, make sure that there is no residual voltage. Connect the battery and try to turn on the book.

Unfortunately, at the stage of disconnecting the pads from the battery connector, the latter fell off the board along with the pad ... I had to get a 25W needle soldering iron and solder it back. However, the main struggle for the book turned to solder the connector, since it behaved well when connected only to a mains power supply. Those. The battery (its presence / absence) does not affect the performance of the Pocketbook 611. A valuable observation is made - the battery connector is not designed for a large number of disconnections-connections

3. How exactly does the book not turn on? Does the green light turn on? Are both halves of the indicator on? What firmware was installed? What firmware was installed before? What does “unofficial” firmware mean? Where did you get it? What is the serial number of the device?

I described all the information that I knew to Michael, adding to the screen a photo with the frozen update process.

4. Make a memory image (I assume that you have access to a Linux machine)

~ # dd if = / dev / $ YOUR_SD_CARD of = sd_card_dump && sync && sync

just make sure that you specify the path to the device, not the partition, i.e. there must be something like / dev / sde (without digits)

for reliability, it is worth making sure that the entire memory area was saved, you can make sure of this:

(in my case, the card is defined as / dev / sde)

mike @ mike-P55A-UD4: / tmp $ cat / sys / block / sde / size

3862528

mike @ mike-P55A-UD4: / tmp $ expr $ (cat / sys / block / sde / size) \ * 512

1977614336

the resulting file must be exactly equal to the number 1977614336 (in my case)

In my case (Fedora 17), the dd command was launched via su, and the device was mmcblk0 (the microSD card was connected via an adapter to the card reader of the laptop). In more detail all actions in the terminal are reflected in the general recovery log.

5. If there is an opportunity, please send the first 16 megabytes of the card image, I will try to record them on my device and see what happened there.

# dd if = / dev / $ YOUR_SD_CARD of = sd_dump_16M bs = 1M count = 16 && sync && sync

This item also did not cause any questions, the archive with the image was immediately sent for research.

6. I took a memory image from my device, try to write it onto your card (after you made a backup) and turn on the device with the update buttons held down. The screen should show signs of life. If this happens, try to install the latest official firmware from the site.

here is the link to download dl.dropbox.com/u/2632562/sd_dump.tar.bz2

when you write an image on the card, then use this command

# dd if = sd_dump of = / dev / $ YOUR_SD_CARD bs = 512 seek = 2 && sync && sync

Be sure to specify to skip the first 2 blocks, there is a partition table and serial number, they should be saved

After recording the image on the internal memory card and installing it back into the book, the most interesting part began - it came to life! “As it should be”, the backlighting of the central button of the joystick flashed at the first press of the power button, and the update to version 15.8.0, taken from the official Pocketbook site, started to work



The update took no more than 3 minutes, and here in front of me is the main menu of the book, unknown to this point.











It took about 30 minutes to test all the functions in order to conclude that there was still something wrong with the book: whenever you tried to use WiFi (update, check connection) it hung with different special effects. Unabridged connection establishment window, black screen, black window ...



But after the next letter to Michael, the reason for this behavior became clear, and the reason for the original problem was revealed:

I looked at the image of the card that you sent. The user installed the firmware from 613 (611 plus) to 611. Platforms 613 and 611 are very different in hardware, although outwardly they look almost the same. Firmware 611, on which firmware from 613 was installed, for some reason did not notice a trick and on 611 a bootloader from 613 was installed, which cannot work on hardware from 611. I will modify the image of the card you sent, write down the "correct" bootloader and send you to write to your device. The image that I sent you earlier (I understand that you got to start with it), most likely, does not quite fit your particular copy of the book, because There, waveforms are different (they are unique for each batch of screens) and, perhaps, there are still some bindings to the hardware. I will prepare an image of the card within an hour and send it to you in the mail.



I just had to wait for the image (at this time I restored the battery connector using the inventory from the main photo of the post):

In the application archive with a modified image of the card.

1. write the image on the card with the team

# dd if = sd_dump_16M_modif of = / dev / $ SD_CARD && sync && sync

2. insert the card into the device

3. clamp update buttons and turn on the device



if everything went well, the screen should be updated 2 times through black, and the inscription “Firmware update” should appear at the top



When updating, you can use any available firmware, but it is advisable to use as new as possible.

It would seem that this is the last step to victory, but no! It was after this stage that the microSD-cards started to shamelessly fail ... Unwritten update images, file read error when trying to update ... It was possible to stop only by formatting the internal memory and external SD card through the interface of the device itself. Only then the update was successful. In general, there is a feeling that the problem is with the external SD card itself (Apacer 1Gb, I can’t tell it from the kit or bought it separately)



And only after reformatting and rewriting the official firmware 15.8.0, the update was successful, and WiFi started working.







The end of the story, I hope. Tomorrow I'll give the book to the owner



Full chronological terminal log: goo.gl/VBCZu

Archive with all the images involved in the restoration: goo.gl/QEL9Z



Thanks again to Mikhail Boyko for the recipe!



PS: Definitely, Pocketbook 611 is much stronger than it seems)



upd ot krovatti : in some cases, the book is turned on by the update buttons + 3 seconds to hold the reset button, and in some cases the Power button. Tested on several models 611. INFA 148%.