My G2 has been acting really funky lately, hanging on boot and not being able to "hold" recovery flashes. I'll start from the beginning of my little story.
On Saturday, I wanted to do a nandroid backup from TWRP (not sure which version, an older one but not terribly old). It failed several times. I went back into the OS (CM 12.1) and backed up all apps and app data to an OTG USB via Titanium Backup. This was successful. I tried to go back into TWRP a second time. Nothing. Recovery is not even there, I get a security error from what I believe is fastboot. I went back to CM and tried to re-flash TWRP. Now I get a security error on the LG screen. Nothing would boot, no recovery mode, I did have download mode although I had no PC with me so I didn't know this at the time. I was away last weekend so I had to go without a phone for a day... which was actually... kind of pleasent. Don't ask me why I carried two 32GB USBs and an OTG adapter on my keychain but no laptop, because I have no idea why I would do this, lol.
Came home Sunday afternoon and decided to nuke the whole phone with a TOT flash. Since I always wanted to try CloudyG2 since we all know AOSP-based ROMs don't do the camera justice, I went ahead and TOT flashed, re-rooted, re-AutoRec, etc. Everything worked wonderfully; I did a full wipe in TWRP, flashed in Cloudy, then the KK radio, then Xposed. Played around with things like XCam and a few Xposed modules. Everything was working awesome, so I did my restore in Titanium. Took a few hours, but Titanium says everything went fine (sans for a few CM apps which did not restore by design I guess). I checked out a few apps, all my data is there, wonderful. Titanium told me to restart so after poking around a bit, I went for the restart. Hang on boot. For several hours. Tried to go to recovery, fastboot security error. Seems it can't "hold" recovery or something else that I'm flashing?
Clearly I am doing something incorrect here with flashing and all that, but I can't figure out what. I'm not new to flashing and modding, and I've flashed regular CM updates and other goodies onto this G2 for quite a while with no issues. I'm going through the same steps I would normally with CM, and I've had plenty of success with that. Any ideas what I am doing wrong here?
Had same issue and know I hard bricked it trying to get it fixed ... Off to a different phone I guess .. Not sure why it wouldn't hold a recovery either after a few hours ... I gave up .. Good luck
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Hi folks.
So after a sleepless night and a lot of guessing and clicking around with no luck, I finally decided to ask for help.
The story:
Yesterday, I decided to open up my lovely N4 to perform the thermal pad mod (that can be found on these forums), as it was going really hot around the CPU at time and it seemed like a good solution.
Now, I'm no stranger to disassembling microelectronics without breaking them (few weeks ago, I successfully resoldered a broken power button in my old T989 that I've been using before N4).
What couldn't let me sleep at night:
And here is where the problem emerged. After re-assembling my sweet little phone (yes, i did it perfectly right), I tried to boot up and all i could see was an endless and really annoying bootloop, but as the device booted up, I did not worry much. While doing some research, I read that there's people experiencing bootloops with 4.3, so I thought that after disconnecting the battery, it just might've had happened on its own (I was using stock 4.3 with faux kernel before the nightmare started)
At this point, I booted into recovery and tried to flash the rom over, but unfortunately nothing positive happened. Then I tried factory reset and flashing different roms, also with no luck. This is when things started to get really frustrating, as no matter what I flashed, the bootloop was (and is) still there. But then I tries to restore a backup that I did right after getting my N4, back in November, and it WORKED. Why do i still have a problem then? Because it was 4.1 and OTA was giving me error every time I wanted to flash the update, so I kept flashing till i get some results. And then one of the N4 toolkits wiped my entire internal memory and I ended up with only being able to use sideload. Then I tried ALL of the N4 toolkits that can be found in here, to wipe everything and bring my phone back to everything stock, but the bootloader is locked so it cant do it, and it cant unlock it because I cant boot into the system.
Conclusion:
The phone works fine, and it proved it. But no matter what I try to flash (other than the old backup), the persistent bootloop is still there smiling at me like an a****le.
Any ideas?
Sometime last night, my AT&T G2 (D800) decided to go from being powered on and idling, to going into TWRP recovery mode. All by itself. I saw this, unplugged it from USB, and tried to reboot into system mode. But it simply won't do anything except boot into recovery. Powering off, trying to get to the bootloader, none of that works.
This is not a custom ROM, it's 4.2.2 stock from LG. I only rooted the phone, which was several weeks ago, and haven't had any problems, aside from TWRP not wanting to back up anything. I've been using Android since the original TMO G1 with JesusFreke's ROM, so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing, hopefully.
The only recent changes I've made are:
I updated busybox about 3 days ago (but have rebooted fine since)
I grabbed several legit apps from the market last night
Last night I also DL'ed, but did not apply, a ~50MB OTA update that has been pending. I don't think that would install without explicit permission anyway, which I didn't give it?
This phone was encrypted from the start. Maybe that;'s what prevents TWRP backups,, but right now I'm seeing TWRP errors/logs saying something like "Unable to mount \data". And yet I can browse to other folders, and see filenames in \etc for example. However, I don't see any files at all in \boot.
Since this phone has no external memory, and it's customized and has numerous configured apps, I really really don't want to have to wipe it. Although at this point, that may not even fix the problem? Even if it did, since I haven't been able to make backup images, it would be a Bad Thing™ either way. (Yes, I do have a secondary plan with Titanium, with backups going to cloud storage, but these are tedious and now a few weeks old. And wouldn't restore the ROM & system en masse.)
Please help.
Solved?
I'm not sure what caused this to occur, but I found somewhat of a solution after digging deep into my Google-fu.
I followed the instructions in this XDA thread and it actually worked. I didn't have adb access, but I was able to use dd successfully. It allowed me to boot into the device, unencrypt it, then arrive at the lock screen.
However, when I put in the lock code, it went apesh!t and played multiple notification sounds, with a blue circular wait symbol. It also flashed the LED from green to blue, as it normally only does during boot. Once I pressed the power button, I was back back into TWRP.
So then I followed Step 2 again, and once in the phone, I used terminal to run the dd command from inside the OS. This might be what it ultimately needs, because the prior attempt in TWRP had an error to the effect of "no space left on device".
I can't call it Solved yet, but it looks good to at least be able to get in and use the phone. I'm backing up with Titanium before I do anything else and will reboot and test its permanency later.
I'm gonna close this thread now that I think I have a handle on what is going on. The fix does survive a reboot, so I believe it's possible to repair the issue permanently per the instructions above. I also ran the phone for 3 hours with heavy app usage and no problems.
I believe what may have happened is my OTA decided to override my choice to NOT update the ROM, as some have reported in this Reddit thread. There's a lot of good info in that one, including how to stop getting nagged by turning the OTA notifications off, or to freeze it entirely with Titanium Backup if rooted.
Anyway, what apparently happens is that when the OTA/upgrade goes to reboot, and encounters a custom recovery, it gets confused... when you try to power cycle or reboot again, it sees the stock recovery still hasn't run whatever it wanted, so it starts recovery again Lather, rinse, repeat.
Fun times.
Sorry for the long post! As a bit of background, I was running stock rom with sytemless root, EX Kernel, TWRP and I had just enabled xposed (the only new variable in my setup). So I plugged my 6P in at the gym before I play some ball. Phone proceeds to random "reboot" a few seconds later, no huge deal I thought. Then it enters The Indestructible Bootloop (IBL). It won't boot past the animated colored dots. Play for a couple hours, phone still not booted; slight to moderate anxiety setting in. I figure, worst case scenario, I have to flash a factory image when I get home. So I try to reboot it a couple times by booting into the bootloader (holding power and down vol), then recovery then reboot. I also flashed the xposed uninstaller and deleted /data/data/de.robv.android.xposed.installer/conf/modules.list: neither worked to solve the IBL. Then I just waited til I got home and tried to plug it into my Win 10 PC. Nothing. Device manager doesn't even recognize it as anything plugged in; moderate to high anxiety setting in. Note that I could previously connect it just fine and device manager doesn't see ANY kind of device connected, so I don't believe it's a driver issue or anything like that. So, through TWRP, I look to see what's on the device storage: I have an old nandroid ( I believe stock unrooted) and a custom rom, Chroma as well as some GApps and a couple custom kernels. At this point I wanted to preserve my text messages so I did a new nandroid then tried restoring the old nandroid as well as flashing Chroma without wiping data. Nothing, still won't get past the colored dot IBL. So then I tried doing a full wipe before trying the old nandroid and Chroma again. Nothing. Figured it may have been a malicious file on my sd card so I deleted a few files that I didn't immediately recognize in TWRP and tried all the above steps again. Still nothing. So I just called Google and they offered to replace it. However I would like to have my phone for the weekend and not have to have a $650 hold on my account. I'm on Project Fi so I can't use a temporary burner phone. I figure I'm probably screwed but hopefully one of you geniuses could help me out. Thanks in advance!
tl;dr: Phone randomly rebooted and entered indestructible bootloop. Windows device manager won't recognize it at all. Tried everything I can, including clean flash of custom rom and an old nandroid: phone still won't get past bootloop.
Hey all! I'm having a strange issue regarding boot looping that I can't seem to find an answer to on here or anywhere else, I hope you guys can help.
So my T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S5 (SM-G900T), purchased in May 2014, while perusing Facebook the other day, randomly shut down in the middle of perfectly normal use and started bootlooping. I had never had the problem before. The device had been rooted for months (I forget what method I used) but it was running a stock Lollipop rom. The first thing I did was factory wipe and cache wipe through Android stock recovery. It worked!... for a couple hours. Then the bootloop started again.
I went and sought a new stock rom, believing that somehow mine had been corrupted, and flashed it via Odin. I also flashed TWRP. Clean wipes, new rom, dalvic/etc. wipes, and booted into stock Marshmallow. It worked!... for a couple hours. Then it started bootlooping again. I went into TWRP and tried to wipe just caches and whatnot, but it wouldn't start again. Long battery pulls sometimes allowed the phone to boot, but it started looping again after ~5-10 minutes.
So I installed the Twisted Lollipop but couldn't even get that to boot. I went back and found the earliest available firmware for my device (as I bought mine right after it came out) and flashed it. Wipe wipe flash wipe whatever, and a succesful boot. It was looking good! I was able to install a number of OTA updates. I was at Android 5.1 when I decided to call it a night and hold off on the further OTAs for today. Today I got up and got ready for work, all's well. As I'm getting ready to leave, I allow Google to update some apps, and begin installing Facebook, Spotify, Cap Metro (for my area's public transit system) and maybe something else, I don't remember. Anyway, as the updates are downloading or installing and I'm checking my email, boom, crash, bootloop.
What's going on here? I've never heard of hardware causing boot loops, but could it be that? I dropped my phone (although protected by a Spigen case) earlier this summer and it cracked the screen-- could it have messed with the motherboard in some substantial way? I had noticed it getting hotter and the battery lasting less than usual, but I attributed that to the device's age.
Any help, any advice, any direction you could give would be extremely appreciated. I don't have the capital to replace the phone right now, and I use it all the time. Thanks folks!
TL;DR O was janky after dirty flash so downgraded but now N isn't right even after super wiping everything and reflashing stock N image.
Ok so I have no idea why I decided to try out O with all the dumb bugs that are being reported and the lack of a simple night light enabler but I did anyway. Phone was working great on 7.1.2, had the night light and blue pixel accents, the round icons actually just showed up for me which I like better than all the craziness of 5 different shaped icons cluttering up everything.
I dirty flashed stable O and it was janky as hell so after a few hours I decided to downgrade using my nandroid backup I just made. All seemed fine until I got in my car and noticed Bluetooth share was broken which kept causing force closes. I tried everything to fix it but nothing worked, had to end up reflashing latest N image. From that point all went downhill.
Phone will not show all the round icons anymore no matter what (play store being one that I totally despise being that huge play button, music, games, photos, movies, maps, etc but phone, messages, camera contacts and a few other are working), assistant would not enable and only screen search was there, Google drive backup isn't working either even with turning it off and on but it just says it's disabled by the administrator (??), I even went in to twrp and wiped EVERYTHING 3 times under the advanced menu and chose to repair the system and then fully ADB flashed the stock N image again.
After that, I rooted with magisk but now BusyBox won't install as systemless to the su/bin folder, I flashed both the night light only and the full pixel mod from gerard hoping it would enable the round icons on the GNL but it didn't. I tried flashfire to flash the N system again to clean that up but it just turned the phone off every attempt. I finally got it to work by reinstalling magisk but it didn't actually flash the system even though it went through the motions and said it was successful. I had to do it again for it to work but everything just seems weird now. What the F am I doing wrong? I know it's not a pixel thing for the round icons bc my wife's Moto z force just got 7.1 this weekend and the round icons showed up for her with no mods, no root, and she has GNL like me.
Help?
Try downloading a custom ROM like Nitrogen or Aquarius. Both of those have the options you want without having to flash any other mods. As for Google Assistant I've only had luck using Beans Gapps full package or open Gapps stock package. I personally prefer Beans. Do a full wipe before you flash and you should be good.
First of all, you went from N to O with a dirty Flash.... Of course there will be bugs. If you want to go back to N, Flash N image(boot, vendor, radio, system), when it boots up, go to settings and then perform a factory reset. After that, you can restore your Nandroid backup.
Thanks All,
Yes I do understand the issues with going from N to O on a dirty flash which is why it was janky and I decided to roll back. As mentioned, I used TWRP to wipe everything 3 times and then reflashed the latest stock N image. Google assistant worked after doing that and the interesting thing I found was if I disabled or deleted apps from the phone and then redownloaded or reenabled them, the round icons began showing again (i.e. google play, docs, sheets, etc) so that issue is resolved. I did not use the nandroid backup I made, I basically just started over from scratch and even though the Google Drive backup is still showing "disabled by your administrator", I see a new backup that was made this morning at 6:13am. I also installed busybox through magisk now rather than the separate app so I guess the only thing left outstanding is why the phone still says the Drive backup is disabled by an admin.
I would grab Nexus Root Toolkit, I install to C:\NRT, download the full August Nougat image, save it to C:\NRT too, then do a complete stock restore, this will wipe everything off phone.
Put you back to starting line and then race with flashing and mods.
ossito2012 said:
I would grab Nexus Root Toolkit, I install to C:\NRT, download the full August Nougat image, save it to C:\NRT too, then do a complete stock restore, this will wipe everything off phone.
Put you back to starting line and then race with flashing and mods.
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I did use wug's toolkit to flash over ADB. I wonder if the image might have been slightly messed up even though the SHA-256 matched. I could always try to redownload the image again. I was going to wait until 8.0.1 was released to try O again but when I did have O, the backup options were stuck on "waiting for backup" (the menus are slightly different in O) and it never seemed to move forward. I researched that and I guess it's a known issue with some phones and a fix is supposed to be coming out this month but at this point, who knows.
jrg67 said:
I did use wug's toolkit to flash over ADB. I wonder if the image might have been slightly messed up even though the SHA-256 matched. I could always try to redownload the image again. I was going to wait until 8.0.1 was released to try O again but when I did have O, the backup options were stuck on "waiting for backup" (the menus are slightly different in O) and it never seemed to move forward. I researched that and I guess it's a known issue with some phones and a fix is supposed to be coming out this month but at this point, who knows.
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Toolkit? FFS- fully wipe your device and install full 8.0 image. Done. That is what a full image is for --> janky.
v12xke said:
Toolkit? FFS- fully wipe your device and install full 8.0 image. Done. That is what a full image is for --> janky.
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I don't think you are fully understanding what the situation is. I have said now 2 or 3 times, I have completely wiped the phone 3 times in a row using twrps advanced settings and I flashed the latest stock N image. The only reason I used wugs toolkit was so I didn't have to ype out all the commands to flash. After the flash was done, I manually flashed twrp again and re-rooting using magisk. Anyway, things are mostly back to normal now. I will manually flash O again at a later time.
jrg67 said:
I don't think you are fully understanding what the situation is. I have said now 2 or 3 times, I have completely wiped the phone 3 times in a row using twrps advanced settings and I flashed the latest stock N image. The only reason I used wugs toolkit was so I didn't have to ype out all the commands to flash. After the flash was done, I manually flashed twrp again and re-rooting using magisk. Anyway, things are mostly back to normal now. I will manually flash O again at a later time.
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Still wrong. Nuclear flash everything even wiping the whole twrp since its a huge leap from N under the hood. Never dirty flash and of course clean flashing still won't be enough. Do a nuclear flash, wipe everything including your storage and recovery, back it up. Don't be lazy then be frustrated at a plethora of bugs if you didn't even flash properly.
phantom146 said:
Still wrong. Nuclear flash everything even wiping the whole twrp since its a huge leap from N under the hood. Never dirty flash and of course clean flashing still won't be enough. Do a nuclear flash, wipe everything including your storage and recovery, back it up. Don't be lazy then be frustrated at a plethora of bugs if you didn't even flash properly.
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To be clear, what do you mean by "nuclear flash" bc I'm pretty sure that is exactly what I did, 3 times. Wiped dalvik/art, system, data, userdata, cache from twrp. As for wiping the recovery, that gets done during the flash of the image. So I ask again, what did I miss? Also, it's been said many times that dirty flashing can cause issues, I get it. I wasn't being lazy with trying to get back to N which is the whole point of this thread.