Bricked Fitbit versa rescue?

[Starredswan]

My fitbit versa recently stopped responding to its touch screen. In an attempt to fix it, I performed a factory reset. Since doing that, it no longer starts or responds to anything, except when it's empty (very briefly shows the empty battery with 0% on the screen).

As an experiment, I attached it to my pc and noticed that a COM port opened up. I attached a terminal to that port and saw the following output before it automatically reboots and closes the serial port:

**** FB Main Bootloader [e7d99d0f6a] ****
EMMC Health Info
PRE_EOL_INFO [0x1] DEVICE_LIFE_TIME_EST_TYP_B [0x0] DEVICE_LIFE_TIME_EST_TYP_A [0x2]
Loading the main image from gp2 partition
Loading the main image from partition: gp2, sector: [0x0]
L38  select_partition(partition, extcsd) success
L39  validate_elf(sector, &ehdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success
L43  read_pheader(sector, &ehdr, i, &phdr) success

 This made me wonder, is there a way to use the serial port to upload firmware manually and thus unbricking the device?

[Guy_]

Hi @Starredswan - thanks for your interesting observations. It may be that the partition or boot sector is corrupt so it can't complete loading and this can happen if the factory reset [or some other firmware operations fail mid way].

Fitbit haven't made available a restore process to install a working boot sector or partition, it may be possible to do this but then there would be no need for people buy new watches if it was made available. It is probably used internally to recycle returned watches.

[Steels07]

@Guy_ i agree with your comments. 👍🏿