Magic Lantern Blue Screen of Death April Fools' Prank Bypass

1 points by marinabercea 10 years ago | 2 comments

If at some point you installed Magic Lantern on your Canon camera and plan to use it today, April 1st, you're going to get a simulated BSOD on your LCD shortly after powering it on, announcing you that the camera "is bricked".

Last year's bug report:

https://bitbucket.org/hudson/magic-lantern/issues/2235/5dmk2-bricked-urgent-please

This means that any compatible Canon camera user that at some point installed ML will be affected, if they boot with a memory card with ML installed on it in the camera.

There is no apparent way of getting rid of the BSOD, restarting your camera won't help.

Here are 2 potential tested solutions:

In both cases, the assumed starting scenario is that you turned on your camera and were shown the BSOD.

If you don't want to use ML today:

  - 1st try to turn off the camera the proper way, using the OFF switch
  - if the LCD won't turn off, open the battery door, wait a few moments and remove the battery
  - with the camera off and with no access to battery power, open the memory card door and remove the card that has ML installed on it
  - replace with empty memory card or at least one that has no traces of ML installed on it
  - put the battery back in again and turn the ON switch

If you want to use ML today:

  - 1st try to turn off the camera the proper way, using the OFF switch
  - if the LCD won't turn off, open the battery door, wait a few moments and remove the battery
  - with the camera off and with no access to battery power, open the memory card door and remove the card that has ML installed on it
  - put the battery back in again and turn the ON switch
  - go to the Canon official menu and change the date to anything other than April 1st
  - turn the camera OFF switch
  - insert the card with ML installed on it
  - turn the camera ON switch
  - you should no longer see the BSOD and ML will boot up and function as normal in parallel with the Canon firmware

ML Best Practices:

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=8286.0

TheJack 10 years ago |

FYI - scenario 1 does not work, because the camera still looks for the firmware on the SD card. It just goes blank.

marinabercea 10 years ago | |

It's been 5 days since you commented and I've only just seen it unfortunately, although no longer relevant, I can assure you it does work. ML runs in parallel with Canon firmware. If there's a card in the camera with ML installed on it, it will attempt to run. No card with ML on it, camera boots normally. I've tripled checked both solutions. This post has also been promoted by @autoexec_bin, the official ML Twitter account. You either did something different or your camera is running a different version of ML than mine on a different camera model.