Aura E2 How to prevent / disable accidental reset ?

[joss]

Hello all,
I bought and configured a Kobo Aura Ed 2 for my old mother and she could
use it ( more or less painfully ) for a year.
Now, no more, she describes something that looks like factory reset
( "please connect to wifi or kobo desktop" ) and I am 900 km away
from her to reload everything on her behalf.

I will have to buy a new e-reader, reconfig and fedex it to her

I was wondering if there is some hidden way to customize kobo menus
to disable the 'reset' , 'disconnect' , 'sync' functions , and the KBJ fonts
so that it does not happen again.

Alternatively, can you recommend another e-reader brand ( except kindle )
that allows these customizations or prevents resetting ?

Thanks

[mathil]

I don't think there are any ereader brands that prevent hard reset. They usually all give a warning before actually resetting the ereader, though, so even accidental pressing shouldn't be a problem.
Are you sure that she reset it via the settings menu? I believe the Aura ed. 2 can be reset by holding the power button for 30 seconds, and that seems easy to trigger, especially for an older person. All Kobo ereaders have an option for manual reset, but some are harder to trigger than others, like the Touch 2.0 and Glo HD (pinhole reset multiple times) and the older gen Aura, Glo and Aura HD (holding the light button + using the slider several times).

[davidfor]

For a factory reset to happen, either the user initiated it, or something bad happened. And when something goes wrong that triggers a factory reset, you don't really have a choice. In some cases, you will be prompted to do the factory reset, but, saying no will probably just mean the device will reboot and repeat.

For the user to initiate a factory reset, it has to be deliberate. You can do it from the settings, but have to find and select the option. The method to do it manually is complicated enough that it would be amazing to do it accidently. The steps for both are listed here.

But, this might not have been a case of a factory reset. If something happens to wipe the internal database, or corrupt it beyond the firmwares ability to use it, a restart will prompt to do the setup again. Again, there isn't much you can do except take backups and restore them when there is a failure.

Unfortunately, I don't have any suggestions. Without knowing what happened just before this, it isn't possible to know what went wrong. The database getting corrupted is a well known problem. There are a few things that can trigger this easily (not safely ejecting the device from a PC at the wrong time is a prime example) but there are probably other no so obvious reasons. Some people seem to be prone to it happening, and others never see it. When I see it, I've always know what it was that caused it - a combination of a loose USB port and my impatience.

@mathil: Holding the power button down for 30 seconds doesn't trigger a factory reset on any Kobo device. It will simply force a power off. It is the first step in most of the manual factory reset steps as the device must be powered off to be able to initiate a factory reset.

[Mrs_Often]

Originally Posted by joss

I will have to buy a new e-reader, reconfig and fedex it to her

Wouldn't it be cheaper to have a courier collect your mother's current ereader and send it to you?

Originally Posted by davidfor

@mathil: Holding the power button down for 30 seconds doesn't trigger a factory reset on any Kobo device. It will simply force a power off. It is the first step in most of the manual factory reset steps as the device must be powered off to be able to initiate a factory reset.

Actually pressing the power button for 30 seconds on the Clara HD is the only way to perform a manual factory reset. But the device has to be off, and it has to be plugged into a charger:

https://www.kobo.com/help/en-US/arti...-kobo-clara-hd

[frostschutz]

Basically there is no way to disable it. Well you probably could, but then you'll have a brick, because Factory Reset is like the only method these devices use to recover a corrupt filesystem or database.

The edition 2 has an internal sd card I believe? You could take out and create a backup image of it, and clone to a replacement card.

On my H2O, I cut a hole in the back of the reader so this card can be accessed directly without taking the device apart. This hole is then sealed with a bit of duct tape.

I don't know if your mother would be able to turn off the reader, replace a microsd card, and turn it back on again.

Where does she live? If there was someone in her area that could help with the set up, you might be able to avoid the shipping issue.

If it was my uncle, I could probably get him to connect the device to his PC, which I have remote access to. The difficulty lies in making sure whatever you copy onto the device remotely, actually works as intended...

Restoring a full backup copy via PC would restore everything except wifi connectivity as the wifi password isn't stored in the user accessible area. And if you use mods those too of course, they install to the system partition; maybe it would be possible to combine several mods into one KoboRoot.tgz to install them all in one go.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Mrs_Often

Actually pressing the power button for 30 seconds on the Clara HD is the only way to perform a manual factory reset. But the device has to be off, and it has to be plugged into a charger:

Like I said, holding the power button down for 30 seconds doesn't trigger a factory reset for any Kobo device. In every case, something else has to be done. In this case do it twice while the device is connected to PC.

[joss]

Also she mentioned the Kobo asking to enter demo mode at startup ( the
one used by vendors in stores ). I had never seen that before.
I agree the 'reset' function is not so easy to trigger accidentally but on the
other hand, the Kobo Ed2 is specially sensitive ( it's very difficult to
customize precisely the light mode and when using the virtual keyboard
for a search , it's also very difficult to select the chars you want , you always
end up selecting the char beside the one you want ,
I also noticed that on a demo model in a store ) .
All that does not happen on my good old Ed1.
Anyway, thank you for your answers .
I will send a new Kobo to my mother and repair the other one when I visit
her so that she has always a spare Kobo .

Joss

[frostschutz]

The recovery partition has these files: /upgrade/fs.tgz and db.tgz

It will populate the internal system partition, and the user partition with those, respectively.

It should be possible to dope those files to include a fully configured system, so a factory reset would give you the fully prepared reader with your standard selection of books.

However by default, the recovery partition is not very large, so you'd likely have to resize partitions first in order to squeeze more than just a handful of books on it.

You'd have to be familiar with Linux (well enough to resize partitions, and produce/change/modify tar archives with proper paths) to make this work. And you still need access to the internal SD card, as the device will brick if anything goes wrong.

It would be an interesting (albeit dangerous) idea for a mod that automagically takes a snapshot of the current state of the reader, and have that snapshot restored on factory reset.

[joss]

Thanks for all your answers. As I prefer to spend more time reading than doing too
complex technical things I already have bought a new clara HD .
BTW, is there a way to close this thread as fixed ? ( Sorry I am a newbie to
these forums )

[koboy]

Originally Posted by joss

Thanks for all your answers. As I prefer to spend more time reading than doing too
complex technical things I already have bought a new clara HD .
BTW, is there a way to close this thread as fixed ? ( Sorry I am a newbie to
these forums )

the advice given to you will hopefully be useful to others in the passing of time. personally i like the eternal threads that rarely get closed.

best wishes koboy