BB10: How to Restore a 'Bricked' Dev Alpha Device

March 27th at 12:00am

While frantically trying to get my apps ready for the BlackBerry 10 launch I accidentally broke my Dev Alpha B device. It froze and I tried to reboot to fix it- unfortunately it got stuck at the loading screen for a long time (40 minutes).

This article explains how I was able to get my Dev Alpha device back up and running.

References

Dev Alpha Device Software Update [developer.blackberry.com]
QFile class documentation [doc.qt.digia.com]
Sample app that uses QFile [qtcentre.org]

How I broke / hung the phone

I was in the momentics IDE and accidentally clicked the ‘debug’ icon when I wanted the ‘release build’. I quickly cancelled the debug operation and tried to run the ‘release’ build. Unfortunately, the icon for my app was greyed-out on the home screen and nothing happened for awhile. I was unable to delete the app from the dev alpha (greyed out), so I restarted the device.

On restart it hung on the loading screen with the moving out of focus image in the background that changes colors. Stayed like this for 20 minutes, so I did a battery pull & reboot. It hung on the same screen for hours. I was pretty upset.

How I fixed the problem

Fortunately there was a solution to my problem: Reinstall the Device OS. Blackberry makes the OS installer available for download here. After downloading the installer I followed these steps:

Unplug the dev alpha from the computer
Battery pull of Dev alpha
Run the updater on the computer
Put the battery back into the dev alpha
Quickly Plug the USB cable back in
Enter the device pin in the updater (prompts for it)

Now everything appeared to be back to normal...

Side Effects (YMMV)

In my case I lost the ability to view the device logs using slog2info. To get around the problem I wrote a simple QFile based logging class that logged events to a file rather than to slog (QFile references in the 'References' section above).