[Kindle Fire General] DeviceGuru:
Awesome guide! and a question...

Brilliant job on the guide!

I stopped by to study this because I seem to have soft-bricked my KF. My situation seems unusual, though, as it's stuck in the standard Amazon KF logo (bright initially, then dim forever), so probably in recovery mode (per your writeup), yet with Dalvik Debug Monitor I can make screenshots (on my linux box), and can reset it via "adb reboot." but "adb shell" crashes and burns with "exec '/system/bin/sh' failed: No such file or directory (2)" and fastboot commands result in never-ending "< waiting for device >". I guess there's no way to change the bootmode without shell access from adb. I had rooted the device and installed FireFireFire and TWRP with KFU, and then posted a blog article at deviceguru dot com about the process, and then was attempting to replicate the whole process by reflashing the original v6.3 FW downloaded from Amazon.com and going through the steps over again.... And here I am with a soft-bricked KF. I have a bad feeling that my only recourse is to get one of the special USB "factory cables," since I don't particularly want to take the back off the KF. Does anyone know a way out of this other than the cable?

Thanks again to kinfauns, for the really superb beginners' guide!

cheers all

deviceguru

[SOLVED]

So I got the factory cable, and that enabled me to use KFU to get the KF into TWRP. But in TWRP I couldn't mount the /sdcard partition. Since I could bring up an adb shell (on my linux system) while the KF was in TWRP, I tried mounting the /sdcard partition ("mount /sdcard") but android returned the error, "mounting /dev/block/mmcblk0p12 on /sdcard failed: Invalid argument". Then, based on a something I read in a post on this forum, I tried to format the partition using the android command "busybox mkfs.vfat /dev/block/mmcblk0p12" but it returned the error: "mkfs.vfat: applet not found". Then used TWRP's "mount as USB" function to see if I could format it externally, using gparted on my linux system. It seemd to format as fat32 just fine, so I transferred an update.zip file to the sdcard. However, after performing a USB-unmount in TWRP, I still couldn't mount the /sdcard partition either via TWRP or via the adb shell. So I then tried the external format from windows box, but with the same results as when I formatted it from my linux box.

Finally I found the solution in this XDA Developers Forum thread: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1424784

The trick was to use android's parted command to repartition and reformat the /sdcard partition. I followed the procedure exactly as presented in that thread, and afterwards I could mount the partition from within android (via adb shell), and could also usb-mount it (using TWRP), transfer an update.zip to it, and reflash the ROM from within TWRP using that file.

As a result of this experience, it seems to me that it would be useful for KFU or the recovery utilities (e.g. TWRP) to add reformatting functions that actually use parted to reformat existing partitions, since the "wipe" commands appear to only perform "rm -rf *" operations and don't actually reformat the partitions. I've read posts by others who have had their KFs rendered inoperable due to the inability to repair a corrupted /sdcard partition's format and transfer update.zip or TWRP backup files to it. From the post I pointed to above, it seems like a reformat wizard function would be possible and helpful.

All's well that ends well... particularly thanks to the great posts on this forum!