reMarkable 2 Recovery / Unbricking

Tools for recovery (works only under Linux)

Parts and prerequisites

To put the rM2 in recovery, you will need:

• USB-C breakout board (you could probably use USB-C to Audio adapter and plug headpholnes to short B8)

• Pogo pin adapter to usb the pogo pins are as follows, when viewed from the side, device facing up (VBUS is near the usb-c) GND,ID,D+,D-,VBUS

• imx_usb_loader a binary is included, but feel free to compile it

Guide

• run dmesg -w on your host to monitor
• power off the device (hold the power button for 10 seconds, the screen will not update)
• connect the USB-C breakout board
• pull down B8 (connect B8 over a 10K resistor to B12)
• connect the pogo pins to the tablet and to the host usb Make sure the orientation is correct, you risk frying your device if you connect the pins in the wrong order
• make sure the connection is good, use a short good, different cable, etc
• if the device does not start on its own, press the Power Button. The screen may flash and say it's starting. After that, the screen will no longer update.
• you should see a new device USB HID v1.10 Device [Freescale SemiConductor Inc SE Blank ULT1]
• remove the pulldown resistor (disconnect B8) Your device will restart automatically in a loop if you miss this step
• run sudo ./imx_usb or add the udev rules to use it without sudo
• should see USB Mass Storage device detected
• should see a new mountable block device

Next steps

• to recover the ssh password, mount the home partition grep Developer <mountpoint>/root/.config/remarkable/xochitl.conf
• to find a mountpoint run mount | grep home
• your dmesg output will show the letter assigned to the block device (sdc will be used for the following examples)
• Open the uboot.env file from the root of the BOOT partition in a text editor. You'll see something like active_partition=3. This indicates that your remarkable boots from sdc3, so we'll use sdc2 to restore the sdc3 partition.
• Backup the working system partition using sudo dd if=/dev/sdc2 of=rm2-sdc2.raw bs=4096 status=progress or sudo dd if=/dev/sdc3 of=rm2-sdc3.raw bs=4096 status=progress.
• Restore the sdc3 partition with the backup of sdc2 using sudo dd if=rm2-sdc2.raw of=/dev/sdc3 bs=4096 status=progress assuming your active partition is 3. If your active partition is 2 restore it using sudo dd if=rm2-sdc3.raw of=/dev/sdc2 bs=4096 status=progress
• You can instead use codexctl to download an update file for your device, and extract the image from it. You can then use dd to replace the active partition with the stock partition.

Troubleshooting

• It is very important to use a pogo connector because it is almost impossible to achieve a stable connection in another way.
• Only if the device is in recovery mode there will be messages in the dmesg output.
• If you see messages like usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71, most likely it means that the device is in recovery mode and you have a poor connection to the pogo port.
• B8 is on the bottom part of the USB port. So screen side is A and bottom side is B.
• if not sure that device is powered off, try to connect the device to the charger, the screen should blink, disconnect it from the charger, hold the power button for at least 15 seconds.

What the setup looks like

UART

UART6 TX is exposed via the pogo pins ID pin.

You can connect an FDTI chip (3V3) to ID pin to get UART at 115200 baud.

For more details checkout the wiki: https://web.archive.org/web/20230619082431/https://remarkablewiki.com/tech/rm2_otg_pogo

For details building u-boot and Linux to support this checkout meta-freescale-3rdparty.