Kindle Fire HDX living up to its name (melt down)

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donald_k

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 23, 2002
Messages
426
Teezer: My Kindle Fire tablet had a high temp event and potentially could have blown up if my wife held it the wrong way when it failed. Against all odds, at home data recovery of the family pics was 100% successful.

My Kindle Fire HDX 8.9 64GB decided to self destruct last June while my wife was using it in bed, just a few hours before I was to back it up to my laptop. Screen just dimmed out slowly to black and under a bright light shone on it the tablet was showing parallel white/black lines. Called Amazon support and went through the motions, and got offered a replacement at 25% discount - must send broken tablet back to them (and they don't do data recovery AT ALL).

As it was out of warranty, I didn't give two fucks about the 25% discount versus getting my data, I opened it up. In the pic, after removing the EMI shielding, I found its DRAM chip fried with a melted pool of plastic under it, approx 5 mm from its battery. Very grateful that the EMI shielding contained this melt down enough from the battery which is only approx 5 mm away and fully charged. For a BGA chip like that to melt out, it has to undergo some very high temperatures (>400 C).

After removing the eMMC chip from its mainboard, I put it in my eMMC reader, and with HDDGuru's Raw Copy Tool I made a raw dump of the chip.

Easily recovered 100% of the family pics/videos taken by my wife with the device (25GB worth).

ZRlszGYl.jpg


Note the pool of plastic under the chip, and to the right side of it, the battery resides just off the pic's frame.

P.S. Amazon is currently hiding my 2-star review containing the attached pic which was posted yesterday (held off until data recovery was complete, as I expect they will be asking for the wreckage).

Edit: Tweaked the link for a small res photo - I don't post photos online to forums often.
 
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You have a cloud connected tablet and didn't backup the pics online?

Anyway shit happens, stop acting like the battery almost exploded killing your entire family and all relatives.
 
And for the love of criminy why do you use your 8.9" tablet as a camera?
 
HeavensCloud said:
And for the love of criminy why do you use your 8.9" tablet as a camera?
Click to expand...
Use some common sense. This is a tablet that people typically keep next to them in bed on the nightstand. Despite it being an Amazon tablet to which they very well likely also have Amazon Prime and its Prime Unlimited Photo cloud storage, they didn't use it. 25GB of kinky photos! Rock on, man! XD
 
I'd ask why you don't use a cloud service to automatically back up pictures but then I remembered that your pictures have a resolution I mistook for a calculation of pi and civilization would end before you could finish uploading them to the cloud.
 
Wife used the tablet for what it was - and expected it to be offline storage. I don't subscribe to Amazon Prime as it isn't worth it up here in Canada.

I have yet to figure out how to get into Amazon's cloud to see what it did download from the tablet. When I bought it two years ago and set it up the cloud feature wasn't made obvious as I didn't buy into their Prime service.

Normally the backups are done to a laptop and also a desktop HTPC which has a backup HDD that normally sits disconnected.

Edit: Got into the Cloud, nice little 5GB repository, deleted everything off it.
 
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