jailbreaking a kindle paperwhite 2 in 2025

posted (updated )

The other day my kindle went into a bad state, and had to be factory reset.

I got it working again, so here are the notes I took along the way.

What I have

literature review

jailbreaks:

stock kindle firmwares

list of firmware versions from amazon That doesn't work in the internet archive anymore, so I made a backup

the plan:

Try rooting 5.4.0 with K5 JailBreak

if that fails, update to 5.10.3 and try KindleBreak

results

K5 jailbreak worked fine on 5.4.0, so I'm not updating for now

On boot after reset the kindle wants to be registered, I got around this by copying my system/acw/* from the old kindle usb fs, and by deleting the welcome document

I'm not convinced copying the acw helped any in hindsight, but that's what I did, and I'm not undoing all this to check if it was necessary

mods (mostly from NiLuJe's Snapshots thread)

KUAL has a "don't ota" button so I did that not the instructions from WinterBreak, pretty sure it's the same thing but automatic.

I'm pretty sure I'm never connecting this to wifi ever again so it shouldn't matter, but better safe than sorry.

Now I can read my book :)

=== UPDATE 2025-05-30 some certs expired and things wouldn't launch anymore

keysotre and update from https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=4506164&postcount=1295 update mkk/developer.keystore put k5 .bin in root, run update, not sure this was required no dice install jailbreak again, do keystore stuff again, no dice install mkk give up?