Brick (electronics)

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The word "brick", when used in reference to consumer electronics, describes an electronic device such as a mobile device, game console, or router that, due to severe physical damage, a serious misconfiguration, corrupted firmware, or a hardware problem, can no longer function, hence, is as technologically useful as a brick.^[1]

The term derives from the vaguely rectangular shape of many electronic devices (and their detachable power supplies) and the suggestion that the device can function only as a lifeless, square object, paperweight or doorstop.

This term is commonly used as a verb. For example, "I bricked my MP3 player when I tried to modify its firmware." It can also be used as a noun, for example, "If it's corrupted and you apply using fastboot, your device is a brick."

In the common usage of the term, "bricking" suggests that the damage is so serious as to have rendered the device dead.^[2]

Cause and prevention

Bricking a device is usually a result of interrupting an attempt to update the device. Many devices have an update procedure which must not be interrupted before completion; if interrupted by a power failure, user intervention, or any other reason, the existing firmware may be partially overwritten and unusable. The risk of corruption can be minimized by taking all possible precautions against interruption.

Installing firmware with errors, or for a different revision of the hardware, or installing firmware incompetently patched such as DVD firmware which only plays DVDs sold in a particular region, can also cause bricking.

Devices can also be bricked by malware (malicious software)^[3] and sometimes by running software not intentionally harmful but with errors that cause damage.

Some devices include two copies of firmware, one active and the other stored in fixed ROM or writable non-volatile memory and not normally accessible to processes that could corrupt it, as well as a way to copy the stored firmware over the active version, even if corrupt, so that if the active firmware is damaged, it can be replaced by the copy and the device will not be bricked. Other devices have minimal "bootloader" firmware, enabled usually by operating a switch or jumper, which does not enable the device to work normally but can reload the main firmware.

A personal computer which uses Windows' operating system can be bricked by a loss of power during the update process, or by installing a faulty device driver.

Types

Bricking is classified into two types, namely hard and soft, depending on the device's ability to function.^[1]

Unbricking

Some devices that become "bricked" because the contents of their nonvolatile memory are incorrect can be "unbricked" using separate hardware (a debug board) that accesses this memory directly.^[7] This is similar to the procedure for loading firmware into a new device when the memory is still empty. This kind of "bricking" and "unbricking" occasionally happens during firmware testing and development. In other cases software and hardware procedures, often complex, have been developed that have a good chance of unbricking the device. There is no general method; each device is different. There are also user-created modifier programs to use on bricked or partially bricked devices to make them functional. Examples include the Wiibrew program BootMii used to fix semi-bricked Nintendo Wiis, the Odin program used to flash firmware on Samsung android devices,^[8] or the fastboot Android protocol which is capable of reflashing a device with no software installed.^[8]

A soft bricked rooted Kindle Fire can be unbricked by using unrooting tools.

A personal computer may be unbricked by using System Restore or backup.

Systems

In principle any device with rewritable firmware, or certain crucial settings stored into flash or EEPROM memory, can be bricked. Many, but not all, devices with user-updatable firmware have protection against bricking; devices intended to be updated only by official service personnel generally do not.

Amongst devices known to have bricking issues are: older PCs (more recent models often have dual BIOSes or some other form of protection), many mobile phones, handheld game consoles like the PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS, video game consoles like the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, many SCSI devices and some lines of hard disk drives and routers.

At least some older consumer market router models can become unresponsive when the user tries to define a subnet mask that does not contain one contiguous run of 1s and then 0s. If even a single bit is set so that it breaks one of the runs, the router may become bricked, unresponsive to any standard troubleshooting or resolving procedures listed in the manual. Unbricking the router may require opening the case, shorting some jumper pins on the board, then connecting the router by the USB cable to an old PC with USB 1.1 hardware, running a special DOS level program supplied by the manufacturer, and powering the router up. This procedure will flash the router to factory settings and original firmware.

Electric cars such as the Tesla Roadster (2008) can brick if the battery is completely discharged.^[9]

Sometimes an interrupted flash upgrade of a PC motherboard will brick the board, for example, due to a power outage (or user impatience) during the upgrade process. It is sometimes possible to unbrick such a motherboard, by scavenging a similar but otherwise broken board for a BIOS chip in the hopes that the BIOS will work even halfway, far enough to boot from floppy. Then it will be possible to retry the flash process. Sometimes it is possible to boot from a floppy, then swap the old presumably dead BIOS chip in and reflash it.^[10] On some Gigabyte boards, it can also be possible to reflash the bricked main BIOS using a backup BIOS.^[11] Some vendors put the BIOS chip in sockets, allowing the corrupted BIOS chip to be removed and reprogrammed using an external tool, like a universal programmer or an Arduino.

Online and mobile services

Many newer systems capable of accessing online services (such as the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and iPhone) have internal hardware-based unique identifiers, allowing individual systems to be tracked over a network and banned from accessing certain online services. Banned systems usually continue to operate for purposes unrelated to the online service, but they are often considered "bricked" by users of the online service.

Mobile telephones have a fixed identification code, the IMEI; a telephone reported stolen can have its IMEI blocked by networks—effectively bricked—although anyone with the necessary expertise and equipment can usually change the IMEI.^[12]

In 2011, US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) proposed that phones be "bricked" when reported stolen.^[13] Some local police chiefs agreed.^[14] However, in 2013, this was rejected by mobile carriers because "If created, this capability would be in every handset and the 'kill' message would be known to every operator and therefore could not be kept secret," which could be an issue if it fell into the hands of someone with malicious intent.^[15]

References