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[i9505] Cannot enter Recovery after Format Data

My i9505 was running stock KitKat from Samsung and I tried to install CM13 ROM.
So I used Odin to root the phone and installed TWRP 2.8.6.0. After that I flashed the CM13 ROM and the Gapps Nano.
I got as far as rebooting into CM13. But then the "Google Play Store has stopped working" message keeps popping up starting from the initial setup phase. I ignored the message and went on to setup the wifi but couldn't progress any further. The wifi was detected and connected but then it was stuck on the Checking Connection/Software Update step.
I tried to reflash the rom and gapps again to no avail. The third time to Format Data from TWRP before reflashing - still didn't make a difference.
What's worst is now I cannot even get into TWRP! Whenever I press Vol Up + Power + Home, it will show the small 'entering recovery' message momentarily on the top left corner but then it phone simply restarted again.
I tried re-flashing TWRP using Odin, but still didn't work.
I'm stuck now, cannot get into the OS nor the recovery. Any suggestion as to what to do?
Thank you.

vizavalk said:
My i9505 was running stock KitKat from Samsung and I tried to install CM13 ROM.
So I used Odin to root the phone and installed TWRP 2.8.6.0. After that I flashed the CM13 ROM and the Gapps Nano.
I got as far as rebooting into CM13. But then the "Google Play Store has stopped working" message keeps popping up starting from the initial setup phase. I ignored the message and went on to setup the wifi but couldn't progress any further. The wifi was detected and connected but then it was stuck on the Checking Connection/Software Update step.
I tried to reflash the rom and gapps again to no avail. The third time to Format Data from TWRP before reflashing - still didn't make a difference.
What's worst is now I cannot even get into TWRP! Whenever I press Vol Up + Power + Home, it will show the small 'entering recovery' message momentarily on the top left corner but then it phone simply restarted again.
I tried re-flashing TWRP using Odin, but still didn't work.
I'm stuck now, cannot get into the OS nor the recovery. Any suggestion as to what to do?
Thank you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Format Data from twrp sometime corrupts the file system and brick the phone. (It's happened to me once)
The best way is to flash official firmware via odin and start from there.

I see - I'll try re-flashing the official rom. Btw, would you recommend CWM recovery instead then? Honestly, I'm not very proficient with this whole thing. The reason why I formatted was because I still could see all of my old folders in the phone memory. So I thought Factory Reset didn't really clean up my old rom data.
What do I have to do if I want to start with a really clean slate with CM13 (after reflashing the official one first)?
Also, I still have the issue of CM13 setup being stuck at the Software Update step (right after Wifi setup). Any clue why that happened?
Thanks for taking the time to reply.

vizavalk said:
I see - I'll try re-flashing the official rom. Btw, would you recommend CWM recovery instead then? Honestly, I'm not very proficient with this whole thing. The reason why I formatted was because I still could see all of my old folders in the phone memory. So I thought Factory Reset didn't really clean up my old rom data.
What do I have to do if I want to start with a really clean slate with CM13 (after reflashing the official one first)?
Also, I still have the issue of CM13 setup being stuck at the Software Update step (right after Wifi setup). Any clue why that happened?
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
CWM is outdated. Your best bet is TWRP. Try version 3.0.0.
Factory reset doesn't wipe your internal memory, if that's what you mean, you will have to do it manually.
Also, I recommend wiping data, cache, dalvik and system partitions manually from the advanced wipe menu. Factory reset only wipes data and caches, not system.
Oh, and about that stuck at setup issue, just skip that step if possible, you can still change that crap later

If you are unable to set up the ROM, you could flash back to a completely stock ROM and start over.

OK, I'm back on stock Android now.
Before I try flashing CM13 again, I just need suggestions about these two issues I had from previous try:
Unfortunately, Google Play Store has stopped
I have searched for similar issues but can't quite pinpoint the cause. I used the correct GApps for my device and I also removed my SD card prior to installing.
Stuck on Check Connection/Software Update step
Last time I was stuck at this point and, responding to GDReaper, this step couldn't be skipped. The option was grayed out.

vizavalk said:
OK, I'm back on stock Android now.
Before I try flashing CM13 again, I just need suggestions about these two issues I had from previous try:
Unfortunately, Google Play Store has stopped
I have searched for similar issues but can't quite pinpoint the cause. I used the correct GApps for my device and I also removed my SD card prior to installing.
Stuck on Check Connection/Software Update step
Last time I was stuck at this point and, responding to GDReaper, this step couldn't be skipped. The option was grayed out.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The sd card has nothing to do with it.
Sometimes gapps don't work on certain roms.
Just try another package.
If you use A-Gapps, the whole first time setup step will be skipped altogether. So that means that you won't run into the risk of getting stuck at that step again.
Or, after flashing the rom, you could use the recovery file manager to delete the setupwizard.apk after you flashed gapps. That should also prevent the initial setup process from initializing at first boot.

vizavalk said:
OK, I'm back on stock Android now.
Before I try flashing CM13 again, I just need suggestions about these two issues I had from previous try:
Unfortunately, Google Play Store has stopped
I have searched for similar issues but can't quite pinpoint the cause. I used the correct GApps for my device and I also removed my SD card prior to installing.
Stuck on Check Connection/Software Update step
Last time I was stuck at this point and, responding to GDReaper, this step couldn't be skipped. The option was grayed out.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You probably used Opengapps. That also gives me a lot of errors.
Use Bankgs Gapps instead. They always work for me.
http://download.dirtyunicorns.com/files/gapps/banks_gapps/

GDReaper said:
The sd card has nothing to do with it.
Sometimes gapps don't work on certain roms.
Just try another package.
If you use A-Gapps, the whole first time setup step will be skipped altogether. So that means that you won't run into the risk of getting stuck at that step again.
Or, after flashing the rom, you could use the recovery file manager to delete the setupwizard.apk after you flashed gapps. That should also prevent the initial setup process from initializing at first boot.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I used Open GApps, as was recommended in the CM13 post. So are you saying that my two issues were caused solely by the GApps? Because I thought me being stuck at Software Update was due to something else.
Lennyz1988 said:
You probably used Opengapps. That also gives me a lot of errors.
Use Bankgs Gapps instead. They always work for me.
http://download.dirtyunicorns.com/files/gapps/banks_gapps/
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There are two files - one says Dynamic. But the file sizes are exactly the same. Is there any difference?

vizavalk said:
I used Open GApps, as was recommended in the CM13 post. So are you saying that my two issues were caused solely by the GApps? Because I thought me being stuck at Software Update was due to something else.
There are two files - one says Dynamic. But the file sizes are exactly the same. Is there any difference?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not that I know. Just pick the one without Dynamic.

vizavalk said:
I used Open GApps, as was recommended in the CM13 post. So are you saying that my two issues were caused solely by the GApps? Because I thought me being stuck at Software Update was due to something else.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The initial setup process is related to gapps. And I don't recall there being any software update requests during the initial setup. It tells me to wait while it scans for network and WiFis, but I always skip those steps.
Open gapps sometimes work and sometimes they don't. It varies from day to day, since they are updated daily.
Just find a gapps package that works and stick to it until another version of android.

I just want to report back that my CM13 works perfectly with Banks GApps. Thanks to everyone who has helped!

Weird frustrating problem

I'm currently running the latest PureNexus (MM) with a pretty vanilla setup, I.e. no xposed, root, etc. All the sudden yesterday I had a hard crash while doing nothing in particular, a sudden reboot that sent me into a boot loop. It reboots right before the boot animation would appear. The only way I was able to fix it was to wipe the data partition. I was subsequently able to restore my backup and it booted successfully. The frustrating part is it's happened several times since then. In fact I can't keep it running more than a few hours without the same thing happening, even after doing a full wipe. Any ideas?
Thanks!

Arg, I tried flashing the new Android N system image (the official one) which basically flashes every partition and I'm still getting a boot loop. Is it possible that my SD card went bad?

ts_mpls said:
Arg, I tried flashing the new Android N system image (the official one) which basically flashes every partition and I'm still getting a boot loop. Is it possible that my SD card went bad?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you use flash-all.bat from google image or you flashed the images one by one?

I tried both. Both N and MM. Apparently I stumped Google too, they're sending me a new one.

that's weird... Glad you got a replacement though!

Nexus 6P stopped booting, nothing I do is now working. PLEASE HELP ME.

At this point I have completely run out of options. I AM CALLING UPON THE XDA COMMUNITY TO PLEASE HELP ME. Little bit of background info, nexus 6p was rooted and modified through xposed. Had some modules installed, mostly quality of life and visual/theme modules, as well as the latest version of SuperSU.
These past few days my Nexus 6P has completely stopped responding at times. Extremely laggy and could not do **** with it, systemui kept restarting over and over and over again for no reason. Had to keep force rebooting (holding down the power button for 10 seconds) multiple times over and over again, to the point where it suddenly stopped booting into the OS, it just kept giving me the boot animation loop, i could only access the TWRP recovery i had installed. Before all of this **** went down, I had created a TWRP backup because it would be my safety net if i could somehow miraculously get it to work. Now i have a backup of my TWRP BACKUP FILE on my desktop.
I have wiped caches more times than i can count, have tried factory restoring and formatted the data, and tried flashing the stock google image (the same one that i originally flashed at the time that I got the phone when i started to root) as well as flashed the old TWRP version i had, as well as the current latest version of TWRP, and then transferred the backup i made back onto the phone's internal storage. Tried restoring the old backup from TWRP, and each time it restores, it just reboots without reaching 100% and once it reboots, it still gives me a bootloop, this time, no boot animation, it just gets stuck at the Google text with a little "unlocked" logo at the bottom. I have completely run out of options, and have A LOT of EXTREMELY IMPORTANT information i have saved on the phone.
I will say it again. I am EXTREMELY DESPERATE to get my data back, to the point where i am even willing to offer a cash reward for any help to get my phone working back to the way it used to, or even at least to extract the information through the backup, if at all possible.
Additional information about the files and images I used:
angler-mdb08k is the name of the google image i had back when i had the phone and have flashed again
twrp-2.8.7.2-angler is the TWRP version i had back when i had the phone originally at the time
I had flashed and followed guides online through adb method.

[solved] Phone is acting weird ... random reboots shortly after boot

Hi there,
I started this topic because I am out of options and I don't know what to do at this point.
My Phone is a XT1562 DualSim.
I recently flashed http://forum.xda-developers.com/moto-x-play/development/rom-spetrum-mm-volte-t3462690 and I also installed "MODEM" (MPD24.107-70) from page 1, but not right away.
First I wiped everything expect "internal storage". The phone booted but it restarted during boot (which might be okay) but then it rebooted again during boot. The boot process finally finished and I got to the screen "Android is starting - Optimising app x of y." The phone rebooted even during that process and that is definitely not normal I think. So after a couple of reboots android did finally optimise all apps but the phone did still reboot withing the first 30 seconds after it was booted.
From here I did a lot of testing and doing. These are my findings:
- When I set phone to flight mode / airplane mode it does NOT reboot... Hurray!
- When I flash another ROM (Official CM 13, http://forum.xda-developers.com/mot...m-cyanogenmod-13-preview-moto-x-play-t3252255) the phone runs like a charm, NO reboots whatsoever.
- - But as soon as I flash gapps and the phone is booted, I get the reboots again (usually within the first 30 seconds).
- - Again setting the phone to flight mode prevents itself from rebooting.
- - Apparently it doesn't matter what version of gapps I flash. I even tested the light version (ARM, 6.0, Pico, from http://opengapps.org/). It still reboots. I also tried gapps mini and stock.
Oh and I don't think its MODEM (mentioned above) related, because I faced these problems already before I installed / updated the MODEM. Well I thought its MODEM related, that's why I went back to MODEM stock version MPD24.107-52 but that did't help either. I should mention that I am not sure if I had MPD24.107-52 installed originally but spetrum (the rom developer) pointed me to that version: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=69129552
I also restored my working TWRP backup from an android I used for month and guess what, yep, reboots
brrrrr this is frustrating
I never experienced that before and frankly I am out of ideas.
Anything is welcome and appreciated
Thank you

If nothing helps reflashing the whole firmware is always an option

minimale_ldz said:
If nothing helps reflashing the whole firmware is always an option
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks I haven't done that.
To be clear, you mean firmware as in stock rom / factory image?

I always go back to flashing stock rom with rsdlite whenever things went wrong and I can't solve it by flashing small fixes.

rancor187 said:
Thanks I haven't done that.
To be clear, you mean firmware as in stock rom / factory image?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I mean full stock firmware you flash with fastboot or RSD. Roms are usually only system + kernel, so not very helpful in your case

Guys! Good news. I did go back to stock firmware and from there to official CM13. Of course I had to root and install TWRP again but it was worth it.
I lost a few days spending my time with it but I'm glad its all good now thanks to you.

Frustrated after installing O and downgrading to N.. things aren't the same

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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.