Recover a bricked MK802III

 Triviality  1 Response »
Jan 172013
 

What you need:

  1. Macbook Pro + Virtual Box + Windows XP VM
    Alright, I’m kidding โ€ฆ you just need a Windows machine, I tried Windows 7 and Windows 8 (using Windows 7 drivers) are both working, but in case you just have a Mac like me, VM is the way to go. You’d better map all USB devices to the Windows VM since it changes name during regular boot+USB debugging, and recovery boot.
  2. Download the recovery kit from here, use the MK802III link, you will get a zip file. Unzip, launch RKBatchTool.exe and leave it running on your Windows machine.
  3. Unplug everything from MK802III, open the case of MK802III – nail is the best tool for me and it should work for you as well
  4. Follow the document (one in English and one in Chinese) to short circuit the two pins, and plug in the USB to your computer at the same time. I actually found there are two small dot beside the other side of the chip which is more easier if you have a flat metal piece instead of a tiny needle.
  5. If everything works smoothly, you will see one block in the RKBatchTool.exe interface changed to some other color (different color may have different meaning, but I really want to ignore it for now).
  6. Click the button with “โ€ฆ” on the top right corner of the RKBatchTool.exe interface, pick the img file from the zip archive (should be RKM802III_20121115Recovery.img), click “Upgrade” button (that’s the 2nd button from left, at the bottom of the interface), it will take 2~3 minutes.
  7. Power off/on the MK802III, you will get original official Android back running on the stick.

MK802III

 Triviality  No Responses »
Jan 152013
 

Playing with this neat tiny computer and was trying to run Ubuntu on it but hit all sort of problem, and, at last, I think I bricked it. ๐Ÿ˜€

Now to take it back, I need a Windows machine (sigh…) to flush the ROM as I cannot find something similiar to RKAndroidTool.exe for Mac. I suspect it’s some sort of TFTP clients but just don’t want to dig in more.

Later on I found a Windows 8 machine running there but again I cannot play with MK802III as driver could not be found, search the Web … it was said Windows 7 driver should work, but you have to disable Windows 8’s driver signature enforcement. During the search I also found something pretty useful, to dig out unknown devices on Windows.

Will play with MK802III again tonight.