Have you seemingly bricked your nook? Is it (mostly) unresponsive and seemingly useless and dead? Don’t throw out your beloved e-reader just yet.

No, *I* haven’t had any nook-bricking experience (yet), but my dear boyfriend Jake has, and he kindly asked me to share his experience (as well as the solution) with you good people. Jake writes:

So, I recently found out that rooting a nook no longer required you to brutally rip it open and physically void the warranty, possibly destroying your nook in the process. And, thanks to the people at www.nookdevs.com I successfully “soft rooted” my nook with a hacked version of B&N’s 1.4 version software. A few days of troubleshooting and a couple youtube vids later [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UF5w1dKe2U ] , I was able to connect through ADB using windows CLI and install the apps that are currently available from their site. The rooted version had, what I feel to be, a cleaner looking GUI, and alternatives to the majority of B&N’s OEM apps, as well as customizability I doubt B&N will ever adopt. The alternative apps had improvements, and served me well for several weeks. Well, one of the apps available is a version of the Market to easily download other apps available and update the ones you have so you don’t have to go through ADB, and I recently updated one of the critical components of the OS which, for whatever reason, BRICKED it.

It would start like normal, but as soon as it got to the home screen, I was faced with a black unusable screen on both the eInk and touchscreen portion, (although the bar at the top was still active and the touch screen was responsive, so it wasn’t totally locked up). Also, it would refuse to connect to my PC properly. My PC would recognize that it was plugged in, but the two microSD cards inside where unavailable.

In my attempts to troubleshoot, I downloaded B&N’s original v1.4 firmware, loaded the update to MY “external” microSD card (it is normally supposed to be in the nook’s internal microSD card, but that was unavailable to me). I attempted to update using methods I read on nookdevs site, But, as it turned out, due to the nature of the problem, updating in the conventional manor would NOT be possible.

Several days later I succumbed to calling B&N’s nook tech support center. Much sooner than I expected, I was put on the phone with a technician who, also to my surprise, spoke ENGLISH, clearly! So after telling him my email address associated with my B&N account, I explained the problem and he explained the solution. Just like that. It was one of the most pleasant calls to a tech support ive experienced so kudos on them.

The solution was a button pressing combo to wipe the internal microSD card, and install a fresh, albeit outdated, nook OS. I had assumed there was something like this possible, but despite all my googling I hadn’t found this technique, so that is why I am sharing it with you good people.

To perform this:

1. Turn your nook all the way off, both screens should be totally blank

2. Press and HOLD the power button until the screen flashes twice, then CONTINUE to hold it down for 15 seconds

3. Release the power button

4. Repeat this 5 more times

5. Power on like normal (single press)

The nook should power on and the LCD screen should go black, and read off that it is “preparing partitions” and eventually instal a completely new kernel.

It will restart on its own, and hopefully will start again with a fresh, factory install nook in front of you. It will install its updates automatically, but it can take some time so if you don’t want to wait, go to B&N’s site [ http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/support/ ] and download the newest version update, throw it onto the internal “nook” drive, disconnect, and it should update automatically.

Hope this is helpful to someone!