The firecracker exploded. Apparently after 2 weeks of usage of the Chuwi Hi10 Air the eMMC flash is malfunctioning.

In a totally strange way: Every byte on the eMMC can be read, seemingly. Even Windows 10 boots. But after a while it will hang and blue screen. Apparently because it tries to write to the eMMC and when those writes fail and pile up in the caches at some point the system calls it quits.

Anyhow: It means that no byte that is right now on this eMMC can be deleted / overwritten but only be read.

The great chinese support is really helpful and offered to replace the device free of charge right away. That’s very nice! But I came to the conclusion that I cannot send the device in, because:

It contains a full set of synched private data that I cannot remove by all means because the freaking soldered-on eMMC flash is broken.

The recipient of this broken tablet in china would be able to read all my data and I could not do anything about it.

Only an extremely small fraction of data is on there unencrypted. Only that much I hadn’t yet switched on encryption on during the initial set-up I was still doing on the device. And that little piece of data already is what won’t let me send out the device.

Now, what can we learn from this? We can learn: Never ever ever work with anything, even during set-up, without full encryption.