What is bricking?

[joblo]

I know I'm retarded for asking this, but what does it mean to "brick" a player? I think my F20 is bricked, that's why I want to know.

[Mad Cow]

Bricked is when it doesn't even turn on, the battery will be fine but nothing will happen when you try to turn it on.  As in it's about as useful as a brick. Currently, there is no way a rockbox installation could brick a gigabeat.

[joblo]

I did that to mine but then I did the "surgery" where you unscrew it open and unplug the HD and then i recovered it. Now I can put files on it but when I turn it on, the screen is just black. The buttons turn blue and the PC recognizes it now, but nothing show up on the screen.

[Mad Cow]

Maybe you messed up the screen connector somehow, take the front off and make sure everything's plugged in.

[Chronon]

If you can recover it to a functional state then it was never bricked in the first place.  A bricked player is, as Mad Cow said, as useful as a brick.  Usually it involves writing faulty data to flash ROM (thereby preventing you from loading other code properly or from connecting via USB).  This can sometimes be repaired by some low-level interface (such as JTAG).