[fonix232]

So, you got a dead tablet? Failed flashing? It won't switch on anymore? You have no experience in soldering?
All I can say, your tab can be saved!

How, you may ask. Easy question! The SMDKV210 board has a little safety feature, what tries to load the bootloader from SD card if it can't be found on the internal NAND. At least, it was so on my Haipad M7 (not sure if others will work, but they should).
And thus, you can easily boot from the SD card, and run an update!

Only problem is, Urbetter fucked up almost all SD bootloaders. And such, only a few will work on your device. I had to experiment myself, and got to the following conclusion: only the 110301 update can flash the bootloader back to NAND correctly!

So, let's see the requirements:
- A Linux machine (I've used Fedora 15, but that shouldn't matter, a command line Arch will do it, if you can use it!)
- A card reader, and a separate SD card (preferably 4GB, but will work with smaller. I've used a 2GB one, I suggest you use atleast a 2gigs one too!)
- A dead tablet (of course... lol)
- The following firmware pack: http://content.wuala..._03_01.rar?dl=1

From now, let's see how to do it:
- Take the SD card, put it into the reader, plug it into your Linux machine. Make sure you can use a disk management app (best is the Gnome Disk Manager, coming default with Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and some more distros)
- Download the firmware pack I've linked before, and extract it
- Open a terminal, go to the extracted firmware's directory, and do the following (/dev/sdg was my device, use the Disk Manager to determine yours path):

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdg bs=512KB count=4
sudo dd if=u-boot-sd.bin of=/dev/sdg

- When it finished, unplug the card reader, then reattach it.
- Open the disk manager, select the card reader HUB, and take a look. You should see 4 partitions: the first around 100MB, second one around 500MB, third one around 130MB, and last one should be 1.8GB. Format the 500MB or 1.8GB one to FAT32, and mount it!
IF YOU HAVE A NO-NAND DEVICE, DO NOT DO THE FOLLOWING TWO STEPS!
- Copy the extracted files to the mounted FAT partition.
- Delete the original utscript_sd, copy utscript and rename it to utscript_sd

rm -R utscript_sd
cp utscript utscript_sd

So you got two identical files, utscript and utscript_sd
This step is important, because if the device boots from SD card, it will NOT look for a NAND device when flashing the bootloader, and such, will overwrite your partition layout on the external SD!


- Take your device. You do not have to extract the internal SD, it should work without doing that. Put the SD card into the device, and boot in update mode (hold Menu or Back while booting). The update screen should pop up, saying that it flashes the bootloader, kernel, recovery, logo, etc. It should be a bit slow (take some time flashing the kernel and recovery, not a one second stuff).
- When it's done, you're booted into the flashing mode. Here, it will update the internal SD and NAND with the 0301 firmware, and shut the device down as soon as it's finished.
- Take out the SD card, and switch on the device. It should boot normally.

If the device won't boot, try to take out the internal SD, repeat the process (the last three steps), format the internal SD totally to a RAW disk and put it back, format the external SD to FAT32 (whole drive), add the 0301 files again, and try to boot in update mode again.
If it does not work at all, please, give a detailed report of the problem, including the following:
- What did you do exactly
- What happened
- What was written on the screen
- How you broke your device
- What did you use (Linux distro, card type, card reader, device type (mine is a Haipad M7), anything related)


Windows tutorial coming soon!



I would like to thank the following people for their help:
- Asure for his help, and for being the first one who restored the bootloader
- MG3100, for testing all the stuff
- akxda22, for discovering the external SD booting, and for his excessive help
- For anyone else I forgot to mention (sorry, my name memory isn't the best)

This post has been edited by fonix232: 29 July 2011 - 05:02 AM

[fonix232]

Kept up for windows version

[ransagy]

Great work, All of you! I'll pin this for people to find more easily.

[marcoslongo]

ransagy, on 25 June 2011 - 05:23 AM, said:

Great work, All of you! I'll pin this for people to find more easily.

Nicely done! Thank you for your tutorial.

[ransagy]

Since you quoted me, I'll just make sure - It's fonix's work, Not mine, So he's the one to thank
(As well as the wonderful list of contributors on the bottom there..)

[enotar]

you are the saver and now we can try more stuff.......

[akxda22]

Glad to be of some help fonix232... I always wanted to post a summary of how i revived my dead tablet, only if I could remember the sequence of so many combinations that I had tried !!

Glad to see you contributing back to the community... keep it going.

Cheers

[Danbbking]

akxda22, on 26 June 2011 - 11:12 AM, said:

Glad to be of some help fonix232... I always wanted to post a summary of how i revived my dead tablet, only if I could remember the sequence of so many combinations that I had tried !!

Glad to see you contributing back to the community... keep it going.

Cheers

Hi akxda22 and fonix232,

Thanks again for your invaluable help which helped me unbrick my haipad m7. i shall be going through my procedure notes f
or my windows based fix and post it here sometime this week. cheers dan

[fonix232]

Danbbking, on 26 June 2011 - 04:30 PM, said:

Hi akxda22 and fonix232,

Thanks again for your invaluable help which helped me unbrick my haipad m7. i shall be going through my procedure notes f
or my windows based fix and post it here sometime this week. cheers dan

Good to know it helped
Send the guide to me and I'll add it to the second post (kept it directly for your fix ) with credits ofc!

[Asure]

Quote

- Asure for his help, and for being the first one who restored the bootloader
- MG3100, for testing all the stuff
- akxda22, for discovering the external SD booting, and for his excessive help
- For anyone else I forgot to mention (sorry, my name memory isn't the best)

It's not entirely correct: MG3100 figured it all out and flash his tablet. I was the second to recover, without his help it would have been impossible to find out..

[fonix232]

Asure, on 27 June 2011 - 06:21 AM, said:

It's not entirely correct: MG3100 figured it all out and flash his tablet. I was the second to recover, without his help it would have been impossible to find out..

Maybe, but you were the one who documented it all over the steps

[Mokie]

I am trying to revive my semi-dead tablet but I do not have linux (I have windows) My bro-in-law was trying out my device and it stopped responding (wouldn't turn on). (I think he may have been playing with the external buttons) I thought the battery had died but I don't think so as it had barely been used and was recently fully charged. Anyways, I charged it all night long and come morning it still wasn't responding I tried to turn it on but I got no response after a few minutes of letting it sit however I looked at it and it was on but the moment I try and swipe it to unlock it I get error after error after error including that the launcher won't work. I can't get into anything.
So, I tried to flash a new firmware onto it, but nothing will happen. All I can do with it is turn it on (with no apparent response when I power it on) and get error after error. I was using the latest frag company firmware when this happened. What should I try? Thanks

[Mokie]

I forgot to mention that there is also a symbol in the upper left hand corner that looks like a disc with an "!" to the right of it.

[Asure]

And this is on a dropad a8?
I've never seen the disc icon.. but it was some time ago when my A8 had this problem. Maybe they changed it..

This post has been edited by Asure: 28 June 2011 - 03:07 AM

[mELIANTE]

Mokie, on 27 June 2011 - 01:55 PM, said:

I forgot to mention that there is also a symbol in the upper left hand corner that looks like a disc with an "!" to the right of it.

Same thing happened to me. Had to remove the internal SD and delete all the partitions.

[fonix232]

Asure, on 28 June 2011 - 02:40 AM, said:

And this is on a dropad a8?
I've never seen the disc icon.. but it was some time ago when my A8 had this problem. Maybe they changed it..

Nope, that disc icon is from the bootloader, and means the internal SD card is corrupted. Use enotar v2 to format it, it will refurbish the whole internal disk!

[Mokie]

You people are genius! It was the internal sd card that was the problem. I opened up my device (for my first time) and found that the internal sd card was not locked into place and had become slightly raised off the connectors. I tested the card to make sure it hadn't become corrupt and then locked it all the way down and it works good as new again. Thank you again!

[asterx]

Hi,

I flashed C8lean 0.9 to my tablet and now it gets only to display the boot logo, after that it goes blank. If I would like to flash a new firmware seemingly it goes through the process but after shutting down it is still the same, not even the logo is updated. Any ideas what can be the problem?

Thanks

[asterx]

asterx, on 02 July 2011 - 04:32 PM, said:

Hi,

I flashed C8lean 0.9 to my tablet and now it gets only to display the boot logo, after that it goes blank. If I would like to flash a new firmware seemingly it goes through the process but after shutting down it is still the same, not even the logo is updated. Any ideas what can be the problem?

Thanks

To answer my own request:

I've tried to replicate the process under Windows with no luck. It doesn't seem to recognize the SD card if the first partition is not FAT or NTFS (which in our case is not). Anyway the Linux method works very well, I've done it from a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu Live. The most complicated part was to get the firmware to the VM that had no tool to extract RAR files (I was using 110322 from Haipad to recover, as the original link in the first post is not working for me).
Actually I had to open the device to get it flashed correctly beacuse till I didn't remove everything from the internal card it was just getting back to the same non-working state. So I used SDFormatter to extend the FAT partition to the whole disk, than simply removed that partition with Partition Wizard. That part could be acomplished even under Windows.
Also as my tablet is a Dropad A8 it has no NAND, so the step to copy the scripts was not necessary.

[sook]

I have a problem with my system not booting past the earth logo. I tried to download the file from the above link but get an internal error