It seems from your answer to Q2 that everything went OK, and as your friend is not too technical it's unlikely that he could have bricked it. Bricking a PSP requires either 1. to turn the PSP off during a firmware update or 2. to delete files off the flash0. And the only unfixable way (i.e. cannot be fixed, even by Pandora) of bricking just through software is messing with the idstorage, which is even harder, and certainly not something that a 'not too technical' person could do.

So, all in all, I think the PSP is just broken, not bricked. Sorry.


(Though... if this PSP really means something to you... you could buy another MS from a 100% reputable brick-and-mortar source, like Best Buy or Carphone Warehouse, then try. There's always the possibility that the MS is fake.)

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