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All,
Up until this point, I kept hearing that it was pretty much next to
impossible to "brick" a brick. However, I think I've managed to be the
first person to prove that it *can* be done (not that I'm proud of this
fact :-( ).
A few weeks back, I posted a question to these lists about whether or not
anyone had a copy of firmware 1.01 at their disposal...I wanted to have a
back-up in case 1.03 was not to my liking. Dick Swan replied and pointed
out that the Atmel's SAM-BA protocol allows one to read from the flash
chip as well as write to it, so I should be able to copy 1.01 off of my
own unit.
Some time went by; I held off on experimenting anymore with the NXT
because my FIRST LEGO team was gearing up for their tournaments and I
wanted them to have a working robot. :-)
Well, just today I grabbed a copy of the 1.04 firwmare release, and
decided to give SAM-BA a try. I loaded the Atmel Windows software, and
managed to figure out how to save all 256K of flash memory to a backup
successfully. I knew that the image I pulled from flash would not be able
to boot (because of the first few bits that got overwritten by the SAM-BA
boot loader), but since I knew that this was likely the best I was going
to be able to do, I just figured that I'd worry about that if the time
ever came where I'd have to make use of it. Everybody who responded to my
initial post here had pretty much convinced me that there weren't any
major regressions in 1.03 (at least any that were obvious), and I think
everybody thought I was wasting my time worrying about keeping the older
version around. :-)
Since I was already in the SAM-BA software, I figured, heck, why not load
1.04 on with it right now? So I did. And it seems that it loaded on
successfully. The brick booted, and I verified that it was now running
1.04. Mission accomplished!
...except, what's this? I can't delete any files (such as the Demo
program) off of the brick's file system now. I tell it to delete, but the
next time I return to the list of software programs, it's still there!
And, get this!: when I try to upload a file to the brick using the
LEGO Mindstorms NXT software, the brick LOCKS UP! The display freezes,
and the buttons do not respond. I have to pull the battery out or hit the
reset button to get it back again.
Even worse, I just tried to put the brick back into SAM-BA/download mode,
and it WON'T DO IT. It doesn't matter which method I try: holding in the
reset button, using NeXTTool.exe, or even just trying to do a firmware
download from the LEGO Mindstorms software. Regardless of which method I
choose to use, the brick merely reboots itself and reloads the firmware
that's already in flash, cheerily displaying the Mindstorms animation and
playing the startup sound as if nothing's wrong.
It would seem that the flash is not accepting any writes to it, not even
to kick it back in to firmware downloader mode. It's stuck in some
"read-only" mode. And without the ability to modify the flash contents,
the brick is now pretty much useless (a "brick" in the true sense of the
word).
Has anyone encountered a problem like this before? I haven't heard anyone
else complain that their NXT has fallen victim to the same symptoms, but
if anybody has ANY suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing them. I really
don't want to have to RMA this thing if I don't have to...my FIRST kids
would be extremely disappointed. :-(
(Out of curiousity, has anyone had to RMA anything to LEGO before, and if
so, how responsive were they?)
Thanks, everyone,
--
Nathan Anderson
nathan@anderson-net.com
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