Guys,

After reading about all the hardware issues with the device, I guess it's just pot luck if you are going to have to send it back or not! So no hardware issues here this is just software related

My question is this:

"Is there any software related situation that will completely brick the device forever, or will we always be able to re-flash or eMMC and then flash."

Basically, can we as users do anything to the device to render it completely useless, or has anyone heard of this type of situation?

I guess it is unlikely and re-flashing will bail you out most of the time, but I wanted to be doubley sure before testing/mucking about!

Thanks in advance.

As I used to learn back in 90's, there's no software in this world that could do hardware damages, physically speaking. Even that is somehow possible to modify even the voltage on a processor nowadays, there is protection for such cases. My 2 cents would go to no.

How 'bout messing with uboot, that's gonna brick so you ain't gonna unbrick it...

uboot it's just a boot loader as far as I know, so no hardware affected. It's hard to believe that it can not be recovered. Correct me if I'm wrong.

If you pull the cable during a flash then you would likely need to send it to the factory to be unbricked if they can do it.

Ok, well this has been up for while now and we've not many responses, so I guess, leaving really stupid stuff like pulling cables during flashing etc aside we are going to be ok if devel apps make a mess of things, to just re-flash and away we go again!

I have read on the re-flashing wiki that it gets rid of your maps etc so if you do a full eMMC and then re-flash we lose everything, right? That would make sense to me. Just do a periodic backup if the sh*t does hit the fan at least you'll have update files.

And just as a final check, can someone confirm that the two images that we can download are the images that come with the device out of the box? I know there were beta versions knocking about so just checking we have the real deal now.

Thanks.

There a few things that software could potentially do to destroy your hardware, but they are really just special cases. A one time BIOS change will not hurt your system, but if you repeatedly change voltages to unsafe levels many times over, eventually you will just wear your processor out hundreds of times faster than it otherwise would.

Also, if you don't have good heat venting for your system, or if you say left it in a black bag in a black car in the middle of summer and there was a 100% CPU utilization process running then you *might* find a melted CPU, depending on what safeguards are in place (you could remove these in BIOS).

In general though, there is absolutely NOTHING that software can do by itself to harm your hardware. There are certain pieces of software, though, that if you delete or corrupt will force you to use tools that aren't easily or cheaply available on the market to recover your device. These pieces of software are generally the boot sectors of your system and especially on embedded systems, they may be impossible to recover without special cables or interfacing hardware and opening up the devices innards.

There is software that can perma damage your hardware. Esp in 90's there were a couple of viruses, that were destroying HDDs, CRT monitors.
I work for a company that sells POS systems, we had an issue with the bios, that was causing the motherboard transistor to go bad. resulting in CPU fan shutting down and burning cpu (it is built-in so u cannot replace it) . BIOS update solved the problem.
Dont forget about Seagate firmware problem for 7200.11 (or 10?) series HDDs, that was leading to physical damage to the HDD.
I recall there was a problem with early betas of Windows Vista crashing Hard Drives too.

Ok, thanks guys...

I think the main point to take away from this thread is that if you are just doing testing from devel/testing you are always going to be able to recover the device if you brick it.

If you start playing around with the bios and other special case stuff, then you could find yourself in hot water - but most of these cases can be fixed, though either expensive and/or difficult.

@mmurfin87 - you mentioned software here if deleted or corrupted can ruin your system, do you have any examples of these and are we likely to run into this type of software from the repos......

Maybe so... I've read horror stories of people messing with the Zaurus that've managed to completely brick the device with no factory-less going back. I've done lots of reflashes and things with the Zaurus, but specifically because of these accounts didn't wander of into uboot flashing land...