In my opinion if the fix is not know at the time it could be considered bricked, at least temporarily until the fix is discovered.
How would you called a device that meets a fate like that? Stuck? Blocked? Unaccessible?
How would you called a device that meets a fate like that? Stuck? Blocked? Unaccessible?
As an example, if I have a network device so screwed up that I have to do a little power and connection dance to get it to reload via tftp, I'd call that a soft brick. If I have to solder in jtag pins, that's pretty firm. If the magic smoke has come out, that's definitely hard.
With enough resources, one could fix almost anything. So what's enough to be bricked?
* Configured badly in a way that could be fixed in just software, but in a very unintuitive and undocumented way?
* Firmware overwritten with broken firmware, requiring special software and images to fix/update?
* Firmware overwritten with broken firmware, requiring you to open the case and attach a serial cable to a hidden connector fix it?
* Firmware overwritten with broken firmware, requiring you to attach thin test wires to a flash chip and bit-bang flash programming sequences?
* Firmware overwritten, requiring you to lift and replace the flash chip.
* Broken hardware components requiring extensive rework?
Whether something is irrevocably bricked or not depends upon what tooling, documentation, and skills you have. Someone releasing a new tool that makes it easier to recover/unbrick doesn't make it not have been bricked in the first place...
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.[5] 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,[6] or the fastboot Android protocol which is capable of reflashing a device with no software installed.[6]
The word appears to originate from the idea that a device has been turned into a brick. This seems a new meaning to me, as ‘bricked’ isn’t a word that previously meant ‘to turn the thing into a brick’.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/488450/etymology...
I know people who refer to their phone as “bricked” when the battery is flat.