Brick

From wiki.gp2x.org

Brick

When an unsuccessful firmware upgrade renders your GP2X totally unresponsive, it is now no use to you other than as a brick.

Main bricking reasons : Bricking may be caused by a number of factors:

  • Batteries failing during an upgrade. Re-writing your flash memory causes a heavy drain on your batteries. Only attempt this with batteries you trust, or better yet, use a GP2X AC Adapter.
  • Failure to read SD card correctly.
  • Incomplete firmware files. If you're rolling your own, make sure you've copied all dynamically-linked files! If you're using someone else's, make sure you follow the instructions!

Technical background (what is a bricked machine) : When a computing machine starts (be it a desktop computer or a GP2X), some piece of software called a boot manager located at a particular address in ROM (or flash) gets executed. It is responsible of configuring some of the hardware and to prepare the operating system to be launched. It is important to understand that :

  • when one wants to modify the boot manager, he has to access to the memory where it is stored.
  • only a program can access memory (well... usually).
  • all programs need the boot manager to get executed.

So if your boot manager gets corrupted, you are trapped outside your machine.

Depending on how badly bricked it is, you may be able to unbrick it.

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