So a couple of weeks ago, after the unfortunate loss of data on my previous phone, I decided that im going to either use TWRP or CWM to regularly backup data, in case of any mishap, I then decided to go with TWRP because of the user friendly interface it has, since then all has been fine, or it seemed like it had been fine, from about 5-10 days ago, I had been getting "FACTORY MODE IS ON" in red and alert-y colours, but I didn't really care, since it did nothing to really affect anything, it says wifi has been turned off, can always turn it back on, 2 days from now, it started getting severe, I cannot communicate with anyone, no one, even VoiceMail immediately switches off. I then browsed around the internet, and since I had swapped out about 3 SIM cards by now, i was pretty sure it was the phone, after browsing around a lot more, i found Factory Mode is related to a file in the /efs folder, so i said to myself, "hey this isn't bad after all, just change some words and it should be okay" i opened up some root explorer, there existed an /efs folder, there was hope, but there was nothing inside it, nothing, I set all permissions, rwxrwxrwx, and still, nothing came up, so now i'm SURE it's an /efs folder problem, and since i had flashed TWRP... I can't really do anything about it. I've heard about "flashing stock ROM" but I don't know how I would go about doing that, especially if i can't flash a recovery without biting my nails.. I'm just trapped. I can't use Knox to go back to official firmware. I verified that the efs folder was the problem by using the echo command to set it from OFF to ON, but it just returned with "No such file or directory"... I have no idea what to do.. Any help is appreciated at this stage. I have used many applications to back up my efs folder, getting 1000kb of files, but when unpacked it turned into 0kb, where did the 1000kb came from, i think my efs folder is hidden beyond permission editing...Help?
P.S: If it is interesting or helps with diagnosis: Samsung GT-I9505 International (jflte)
Related
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.
Hello,
I have a MB525 that I purchased retail in the United States so it was never locked to any carrier. Currently I'm a T-Mobile customer and have no interest in changing that. I have to say I love this phone, mainly because it seems indestructible. Even years later the battery life is still good, but the stock 2.2.2 Froyo has become something of a problem because many of the Apps I would like to use have started requiring newer versions of Android.
I can't stay in the past forever, but I'm not quite ready to give up on this device so I started looking around at my options, and would you believe I found lots of other people who have this device and have worked very hard to produce updated Android OSes for it, and who have reported reasonably good success updating the device. I figured, Its already out of warranty, so I can't void a warranty I don't have. I also figured I'm a reasonably intelligent individual and have enough experience with Unix like operating systems that even if I get in trouble, I'll be able to ask the right questions to get out of trouble. Guess what point I have gotten to?
I started following the guide wikiDOTcyanogenmodDOTorg/w/Install_CM_for_jordan The Framaroot Gimli exploit worked great. I installed bootmenu 6.1 and Clockwork Mod Recovery. Fantastic. At this point, I was able to enter CMR and backup my mostly still factory ROM. If I understand correctly this is a nandroid backup. I copied that backup off of my SD Card to my PC. From this point I felt reasonably confident I could try things and in a worst case scenario restore to this backup.
Now I happen to have a stock ROM that seems to be a bit rare online, Blur_Version.34.4.806.MB525.Latam.en.01, so I figured at this point I'd do a service and create a backup using CWM after having done a factory reset. So I booted into the stock recovery, did a factory reset, restarted, and the OS was in a like new state. Perfect. Rebooted into CWM, and made a second backup of the factory reset state. I copied this off the SD Card to the PC. Now I figured I was ready for real fun.
I figured, I might as well put the most recent Android version I could find that people were reporting success with. This appeared to be @quarkx Kitkat build. The thread is almost a year old and has 500+ replies and so I guessed that most of the major kinks would have been worked out by now. I followed the directions on quarx2kDOTru and installed cm-11-20141015-NIGHTLY-mb52x.zip from Quarx2k.ru, and low and behold it worked. CM11 booted and everything looked great. WiFi worked. Gapps worked. Play store started installing my apps.
There was one small problem. The phone refused to connect to T-Mobile at all. So I did the reasonable thing. I searched and learned about base band switching, and consulted T-Mobile on what would be the correct APN settings. Occasionally it would connect to AT&T for emergency calling, but it never connected to T-Mobile no matter what I did. From my home I was normally getting excellent signal on the stock ROM, so I am reasonably certain that the actual signal in the area was not the problem, and that this had to be some kind of configuration or software issue. A wiser person probably would have gotten on the forum and asked for help, but wisdom be damned, I wanted to do it for myself.
So more research and at some point I thought, Well, I'll go back to the Stock ROM so the phone will be usable again, and I'll take another crack at CM11 again later. It was at this point that I realized that CMR had been replaced with Team Win Recovery Project. This recovery looked to be more feature rich and easier to use, so I accepted that. I backed up my CM11 install. then went to restore my original backup. Well you might have guessed by now that TWRP and CMR don't use exactly the same backup formats. I saw no obvious way to get back to my backup and couldn't find information that would allow reinstalling CMR. This was the first warning signal I foolishly ignored.
At this point I started looking around for slightly earlier builds of CM11 that might not have had the the problem connecting to T-Mobile. Here is where things get fuzzy about how things got into this state, since the work was spread over two days at this point. Somehow between all the flashing backing up and restoring, the device got to a state where the OS never actually finished could do here is yank the battery and reboot into TFRP.
At this point, attempting to restore would just result in the messages 'E: Unable to mount '/cache' and 'E: Unable to mount '/data' in the terminal. So After searching around I learned that I probably needed to format /cache and /data because somehow they were broken. Terminal commands, I can handle this. I start reading up and find the correct command and parameters for the format, and I type into the terminal inside TWRP and low any behold format can't be found. I start looking around the directories in my file system from inside TWRP and I've got a complete directoty structure, but no files in any directories other than on /sdcard. Well fuuuu.
Not sure what made me even try, but copying any file from my sdcard into /data somehow put /data into a state where a TWRP restore would work. So at this point I was able to restore the CM11 backup, and my phone now boots into CM11, 11-20141007-NIGHTLY-mb526. But.... the cellular network still doesn't work.
But now I am wiser and I am back to the point where a wiser person would have asked for help. So... Help?
Is 11-20141007-Nightly-mb526 the best rom an appropriate rom for my device? I'm guessing I missed something because other discussions on this forum mention newer builds, and also, my device is definitely a 525 not a 526.
Is my baseband version EPU93_U_00.60.03 right? The baseband selector allows me to pick from three T-Mobile settings: 3.4.2.-107-4, 3.4.2.-107-9, and 6.xx.0, none of which seems to allow me to connect to the cell network.
Thanks in advance for any assistance offered.
Sorry for the long potato.
Here is what I did to fix my problem.
I started with the original backup of my stock rom, and I used the unyaffs.exe from this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1199416 to convert my CMR backup into individual files. I then went into those files, and found \system\etc\motorola\bp_nvm_default\ and pulled out the original radio firmware from my device. From there I used advice from several pages to create my own update.zip, copied it to my SD card and I booted into TWRP and installed the zip there. Reboot and Voila, It connected right at startup to T-Mobile with the normal speeds I get from my home.
Bonus, I attached my zip in case anyone else comes across this and needs it.
My Device has an FCC ID of IHDP56LC1 if that helps anyone match their hardware.
This is somewhat urgent because I am leaving the country for two weeks on Friday, and need a working phone. I am not sure what happened today, but my Sprint Galaxy S4 (SPHL720TBK) wouldn't connect to WIFI at my house. My tablet would, so I know it was a phone issue. I rebooted then was going through settings, and just checking things. The phone rebooted itself, and when it came back up, it went through a couple of screens, one of which asked about activation. It seemed like it was installing an update from Sprint, which it had been trying to do for a week or so. But it kept failing, saying it didn't have enough space for the download, despite there being several GB free internally and on the SD card. (I figured it must be because it was rooted). After a couple of additional screens on which I could only answer OK, the phone rebooted again, and that was it. It would not boot again. I decided to power off the phone and deal with it tonight. I can boot into recovery, and connect with Odin. I can boot to recovery and connect with ADB (in sideload mode). I know I could just do a factory reset, but unfortunately, I do not have a full backup since the end of January, and I would rather not lose everything. The phone was running v 4.4.2. I had rooted the phone several months ago with CF Auto Root using CF-Auto-Root-jfltespr-jfltespr-sphl720.tar.md5, so it was essentially stock, but rooted. Is there anything I can do to get the phone back on its feet that will not lose everything? Or anyway to copy data from the phone with it in this state? Any assistance will be VERY much appreciated! Thanks!
Fixed it myself
andrewt2323 said:
This is somewhat urgent because I am leaving the country for two weeks on Friday, and need a working phone. I am not sure what happened today, but my Sprint Galaxy S4 (SPHL720TBK) wouldn't connect to WIFI at my house. My tablet would, so I know it was a phone issue. I rebooted then was going through settings, and just checking things. The phone rebooted itself, and when it came back up, it went through a couple of screens, one of which asked about activation. It seemed like it was installing an update from Sprint, which it had been trying to do for a week or so. But it kept failing, saying it didn't have enough space for the download, despite there being several GB free internally and on the SD card. (I figured it must be because it was rooted). After a couple of additional screens on which I could only answer OK, the phone rebooted again, and that was it. It would not boot again. I decided to power off the phone and deal with it tonight. I can boot into recovery, and connect with Odin. I can boot to recovery and connect with ADB (in sideload mode). I know I could just do a factory reset, but unfortunately, I do not have a full backup since the end of January, and I would rather not lose everything. The phone was running v 4.4.2. I had rooted the phone several months ago with CF Auto Root using CF-Auto-Root-jfltespr-jfltespr-sphl720.tar.md5, so it was essentially stock, but rooted. Is there anything I can do to get the phone back on its feet that will not lose everything? Or anyway to copy data from the phone with it in this state? Any assistance will be VERY much appreciated! Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Since I didn't spark enough interest for anyone to offer advice, had to spend most of the afternoon/evening fixing these problems myself. Everything seems to be working, so I thought I would pass along key parts of this hard-learned lesson in case anyone else finds himself in such a situation.
First I booted into adb sideload mode, which is all I could do anyway. I installed philz_touch_6.23.9-jflte.zip and the aromafm.zip. I was then able to boot into a "normal" recovery mode. Aromafm was troublesome, and I eventually had to manually put the zip into place for it to work consistently. These are both WONDERFUL , and I highly recommend them both. Thanks very much to the creators! I used the file manager to find the files that I didn't want to lose, and used ADB to pull the files over to my PC. (ADB pull <source> <target>) Then I did a full wipe and factory reset. That did little other than delete all my data, which I had already copied anyway. The phone still would not boot past recovery.
I tried to use ADB to install a new ROM, but got a variety of errors. My phone being an L720T, there are not many ROM's available, at least not for which I could find functioning links. I finally found a TAR, L720TVPUBNG5_L720TSPTBNG5_L720TVPUBNG5_HOME.tar.md5, and used ODIN v3.09 to install that.
I still need to go back and re-root the phone, and install lots of APPS and restore data, but at least I have a functioning phone, and I can do the rest on my plane ride tomorrow.
I found the information I needed in a variety of posts here on xda developers, and would not have been able to get through this without all the helpful advice posted to other threads. So thanks to all of you for the wealth of information available here!
So... let's get this straight, i am an idiot. I played with fire and lost to it. I did some things i should not have done with my basic Android/root experience.
Here's what happened: Rooted my Exy S7 Edge today and everything went fine. I had hopes of somehow fixing SD-Card write permissions, which annoy the hell out of me in Marshmallow, but nothing really worked. I then stumbled upon a tutorial to modify the platform.xml located in /system/etc/permissions/ adding permissions. I made a backup of the file and started adding things suggested by the tutorial, restarting my phone several times. Nothing changed anything about the SD-Card permissions, so i gave up, didn't go back to the backed up platform.xml though.
Shortly after, i wanted to copy some files onto my device via usb and my Windows machine suddenly saw no files on the device. Nothing in the "phone" directory, and nothing in the "card" directory. I managed to copy the files via the FX file explorer web access feature and went on to connect a bluetooth device to my phone. I wasn't able to turn bluetooth on.
Rebooted the device and still had the exact same issue with bluetooth. I fired up FX with root access and went back to the backed up platform.xml, because it started dawning to me that something went majorly wrong there. I deleted the modified one, renamed the backup back to platform.xml and rebooted.
After the reboot, nothing worked anymore. I was able to get past the lockscreen and see the launcher (Apex Launcher) but i kept getting crash popups from basically every single app and service on the device. I wasnt able to run a single app, except for the "my files" app from samsung which showed nothing on the device and, and nothing on the sd card and the settings app. I then factory resetted the device in recovery mode (data wipe; cache wipe), because factory resetting it from settings just gave me a samsung service crash popup.
Rebooted the device and still have the exact same problems. It gives me the samsung startup wizard, but i cant get past accepting the license, because as soon as i agree, i get multiple crash popups and it goes back to the license page.
I assume this must mean that i somehow disabled read (and/or write?) accesss to pretty much every partition on the phone, is that right? Is there anything i can do, or have i softbricked the device for good? I don't really know a lot about using adb, and also enabling usb debug mode in the settings is pretty much impossible right now.
I am very thankful for any help saving my baby.
I would try downloading a stock image for your specific decice and flashing through odin.
I soft bricked my phone trying to flash the UK firmware. I fixed it with Kies, under Tools > Firmware Upgrade. It gave me a warning but I ignored it.
Just flash a new rom, u'd be fine !
Phew, thanks a lot guys Just reflashing stock worked perfectly fine. Didn't think it would be that simple.
Point to note - soft brick is usually something you can come back from providing you can get in to download and recovery modes. It also implies a device won't boot to the OS at all. So saying you ate soft brick permanently would imply a hard brick.
Hard brick is a non bootable device with no access to download our recovery mode without the use of a jig.
Hello all,
I have a Nexus 6P, stock, rooted, with Xposed installed. The phone is completely functional for the better part of its life time since I bought it at release -probably first or second batch- (except for random reboots once daily on average, deemed by my investigation and exhausting all options to be a hardware issue or Xposed related).
Today, out of nowhere, the phone randomly rebooted itself and surprisingly it launched the "Android is starting..." dialogue which, if I'm not mistaken, optimize apps for ART. The battery was at 19% before it randomly rebooted, so when it started that optimize apps it went down to 0 (I assume) and it turned off. The charger wasn't connected correctly so that happened. Now the phone keeps restarting itself up to before it gives me the boot up decryption phase of the Data partition and reboots again. I assumed it can't decrypt Data for some reason, so I launched TWRP recovery to try and decrypt data and take a backup copy of my Titanium Backup folder on storage... Unfortunately, TWRP reports "failed to decrypt data" even though I'm 100% positive that the pattern is correct because I'm literally inputting it almost 10-20 times a day for the past two years...
Note: there seems to be a red blinking LED in the top left corner of the the phone. I never even knew this existed.
WHAT I WILL DO
I'll reflash everything system-wise.. I'm ok with that. I'll reflash the factory images, root it, install Xposed, no problem.
WHAT I NEED HELP WITH
I need to extract some folders from my phone storage, namely the Titanium Backup folder. I know the pattern protection of the encryption.
How do I go about doing this?
UPDATE:
Help is urgently needed now indeed: The phone doesn't even turn on to bootloader mode anymore now. It was able to, just half an hour ago. Now all I see it the red blinking LED.
UPDATE2: https://support.google.com/nexus/troubleshooter/3337561?hl=en-GB#ts=3337942
I'll try in 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, please help me with my original problem; extracting data.
I was thinking, if I boot into bootloader mode, can I use adb to pull any folder? If so, will that work in my case with decryption fails or Data partition doesn't seem to mount correctly?
Relevent:
Reviewing some other threads:
TWRP: 3.0.2-2
Bootloader: UNLOCKED
I did NOT upgrade to Android 7.0 nor was I planning to, until Xposed is available.
I did NOT flash anything **new** recently. However, Installed an Xposed module yesterday which caused a bootloop. I rebooted into TWRP, uninstalled Xposed, rebooted into system (which looped once, out of the ordinary) and I uninstalled that module, back to TWRP installed Xposed, and rebooted back into system. It worked for 12 hours and then what I wrote this post for happened as stated above.
UPDATE3:
15 minutes into charging... NOT EVEN A RED BLINKING LED ANYMORE.
Last? UPDATE:
Almost 1 and a half hour into charging and there is no longer ANYTHING. Is it hard-bricked now?
How the **** is this possible? I'm very much capable of solving any sof-brick but not a hard-brick...
Thats a really crappy scenario. Im a little busy right now (not that I can get you out of this regardless) but I sort of skimmed through your post. Are you able to connect adb? If so you might be able to use "adb pull" to get that data.
On my 6p TB is located at:
/storage/emulated/0/TitaniumBackup/
Itll probably be the same location on your phone. Good Luck
KLit75 said:
Thats a really crappy scenario. Im a little busy right now (not that I can get you out of this regardless) but I sort of skimmed through your post. Are you able to connect adb? If so you might be able to use "adb pull" to get that data.
On my 6p TB is located at:
/storage/emulated/0/TitaniumBackup/
Itll probably be the same location on your phone. Good Luck
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was indeed able to connect to a PC after I saw the problem (the bootloop essentially)... But I didn't at the time as I didn't have a plan of action as to how to get my data, so I turned it off. After sometime, I couldn't do anything with the phone... Not able to boot into bootloader, not recovery, the phone is essentially not turning on to anything, not even the splash screen; like a hard-brick. I'm not sure if this indeed is a hard brick as I've never seen any.. and don't currently know what to try next.
Is the LED still showing? if so, do the bootloader boot combo, and see if fastboot devices gets a response in a command prompt - or terminal if you're a linux guy.
if so, you can boot to twrp, decrypt data - try default_password -, and browse the phone's files from your computer's file browser, the phone will show up as Nexus 6P. That's my suggestion, wish you luck.
TnT_ said:
Is the LED still showing? if so, do the bootloader boot combo, and see if fastboot devices gets a response in a command prompt - or terminal if you're a linux guy.
if so, you can boot to twrp, decrypt data - try default_password -, and browse the phone's files from your computer's file browser, the phone will show up as Nexus 6P. That's my suggestion, wish you luck.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I honestly declared it hard-bricked.
Will Fastboot show any devices if the phone didn't show bootloader screen?
I'll try again today.
Update:
Didn't work.
check out my post
[Guide] Fool/Noob proof way to do clean installs on Nexus Devices
http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-6p/general/guide-fool-noob-proof-to-clean-installs-t3518311