[Kindle Fire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] applegd:
I think my kindle is soft bricked for now, any help will be greatly appreaciated.

[Symptom]

(1) Everything was not changed on this 1st Gen Kindle Fire(KF) belongs to my daughter.

(2) KF was shut down as usual but could not boot up about 1 day ago.

(3) Kindle Fire logo flashes and goes dim after being brightly lit for a few seconds, then entered a endless loop which could not get out. It seems my device is trying to boot normally to a malfunctioning operating system.

(4) Press power button for more than 20 second to shutdown then press again quickly to power up, still stuck.

[My Troubleshooting as homework]

STEP 1. I read a lot posts and tried a lot things except the commands to deal with partitions which looks too dangerous to me for now. I will try if I have to do it later.

STEP 2. I tried the USB driver comes with Kindle Fire Utility v0.9.9 but it is not working well on my Win 7 Professional 64 bit OS Home PC, so I ended up installed official Kindle USB driver from amazon.

STEP 3. Some check ups done.

(1) After I installed Amazon USB driver for kindle, Kindle Fire Utility(KFU) 0.9.9 showed ADB Status=Online, Boot Status=4000 via executing run.bat.

(2) I tried to Activating Recovery Mode 5001 in KFU, I got message: "The system cannot find the drive specified, 3801KB/s(510876 bytes in 0.131s) The Kindle has been told to reboot in Recovery Mode" . I notices the Kindle really rebooted after this operation although it said cannot find the specified drive. But if I do Recheck Device Status, it is always shows ADB Status=Online, Boot Status=4000.

(3) I went to Win 7 Device Management, I can see Kindle Fire/Android Composite ADB Interface" is listed and driver is working state. Also I can see one more item as Portable Devices/M:. The properties of Disk M showed the device is working properly.

(4) Win 7 Disk Management windows showed Disk M as No Media, capacity=0MB, Unallocated Space=0MB, Reserved Space=0MB.

(5) Tried some commands:

I am using the stock bootloader (plain "kindle fire" boot logo), the fastboot command must always specify the custom vendor ID used by the Kindle Fire.

C:\Users\ADMIN\Desktop\Kindle Fire Utility v0.9.9\tools>fastboot -i 0x1949 getvar product

< waiting for device >

Stuck here forever.

C:\Users\ADMIN\Desktop\Kindle Fire Utility v0.9.9\tools>fastboot -i 0x1949 devices

<Empty, No Info is Returned>

C:\Users\ADMIN\Desktop\Kindle Fire Utility v0.9.9\tools>adb devices

List of devices attached

2474000600000001 device

(6) I also tried following procedure described in http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1660636 but nothing helped.

1. Turn off the device.

2. Plug the device into USB to your computer. This should turn the device on.

3. Delete the ".android" folder from your Windows profile. This is very important. If you just uninstall the device and driver, Windows will still use this to reinstall the device. You want to start as fresh as possible to eliminate complications from previous attempts.

4. Uninstall it from Device Manager. Make certain to check the box to uninstall the driver as well.

5. Start a new scan for hardware changes in the Device Manager.

6. As mine was stuck in fastboot mode, it recognized the device as "kindle" (lower-case "k")

7. Run the "install_driver.bat" from the Kindle Fire Utility.

8. After driver install, run the Kindle Fire Utility.

9. ADB status will say "offline", that's fine.

10. Choose option 1 to go into the Bootmode Menu.

11. Choose option 1 to boot into Normal Mode.

12. It will be stuck at <waiting for device>.

13. Turn off the device, keeping it plugged into the PC. *very important* This step was one among others that made THE difference for me.

14. Turn on the device. *Hopefully*, you should immediately see the utility spit out some text and your device should reboot.

15. Boots up!! (well, mine did, and I had almost give up hope were it not for my pride and stubbornness).

[ Action Items as Next Step ]

(1) I will keep reading the posts to see whether I can find anything useful.

(2) I guess I might have to make a factory cable...

(3) Hope the 8g storage chip is not damaged by itself...

If you have any advice, please help, Thanks in advance!