So my Evo LTE is running 2.13.651.1, and is on what I understand to be the newest HBOOT (1.19). Naturally, I have S-ON as a result. This is my first Android device, and I've had it about a week since switching from an iOS device. I have root and the Teamwin recovery, which I used to backup the phone. I understand this is called a nandroid backup?
I plan to flash Cyanogenmod 10, in fact I already tried once. It resulted in a bootloop, and I restored from the nandroid backup. I have since learned I need to flash the boot.img from CM10 using fastboot, Flash Image GUI, or any other alternative. Once I do this, if I want to go back to Sense 4.1 like I have currently, how would I do so? Once I flash the boot.img from CM10, I won't simply be able to restore to my nandroid from teamwin, will I? I assume that if I tried to restore from the nandroid, due to S-ON I would be unable to write to the boot partition from a recovery utility and I would be left in another bootloop. How can I get a boot.img corresponding to my stock Sense 4.1 rom in the event that I want to revert to stock?
In the folder containing my nandroid backup, I see a file called boot.emmc.win and a boot.emmc.win.md5. I understand what the MD5 is for, but is the boot.emmc.win what I will need to undo the effect of flashing CM10's boot.img? If so, how would I use it (I do not recognize that file extension, and Flash Image GUI does not seem to like it either)? If not, where would I get something that will work?
I've done several searches here and on other forums, but I can't seem to find what I need. If someone has already answered this question, could you simply point me in the direction of that thread?
Thanks in advance,
Kristoffer
I have yet to restore a back up but to avoid any issues I would use dumlock. Install it from twrp advanced menu and reboot, open it in cm and it will backup boot and overwrite it with a temporary recovery, you then reboot and go back to dumlock and restore the back up, then you are free to flash the nandroid backup and reboot
When you reboot, do not boot to recovery, the boot partition has been replaced with a temporary twrp and all you need to do is reboot normally
om4 said:
I would use dumlock. Install it from twrp advanced menu and reboot, open it in cm and it will backup boot and overwrite it with a temporary recovery, you then reboot and go back to dumlock and restore the back up, then you are free to flash the nandroid backup and reboot
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Once I flash CM and its boot, the boot for my Sense 4.1 will have been overwritten, no? I opened Dumlock in my Sense rom (as I have not yet flashed CM successfully), and it gives me a warning to make a backup of boot PRIOR to using the app, then just under that says the app will make a backup of the boot. If I go ahead and run Dumlock, I'm not entirely sure what is going to happen. It seems that it will move my recovery (TeamWin at the moment) onto the boot partition? If this is the case, why is this something that needs to be done? Does moving the recovery onto the boot partition allow the recovery to write to the boot without S-OFF, thereby allowing a simple restore of the nandroid to replace my rom AND boot at the same time, as if I were restoring with S-OFF? Sorry if I'm not making sense, but I don't really know what I'm talking about here, and thats the only thing that makes sense to me.
I see a button in Dumlock that says "restore original boot." If I install CM and the CM boot, will pushing this "restore original boot" button give me back the boot setup for the stock Sense rom? If it does, then I could just push that button, let it do its thing, and then restore my Sense nandroid with my recovery, right?
Thanks for your help, and quick response.
Install HTC dumlock
Open the app and back up boot
Once back up is successful, press execute
Once the phone restarts it will only boot to twrp, you then go to dumlock menu again and restore boot
Now flash a Rom or restore back up and reboot
Sorry to sound ignorant, but will this method will restore the stock boot regardless of what rom/boot combination I'm currently running? Or is this creating a backup of the currently installed boot, and saving it somewhere for future use? Specifically, do I want to follow this procedure before I upgrade to CM so I have a backup of the current boot, or is this something I want to do if/when I want to go back from CM to Sense that will magically put the boot back how it was from the factory?
Yes, its a workaround that gives access to boot partition and will let you flash normally, I would only use it for stuff like nandroids rather normally flashing because it writes to boot 3 times. It's a lot of unnecessary wear and tear
Awesome, thanks alot for your help. I'm excited to go and try my CM10 rom, now I know how to get back to stock if I don't like it.
Thanks again,
Kristoffer
Hmm. Now I don't know what I've screwed up. I flashed the boot.img from the CM10 zip using Flash Image GUI, then rebooted to recovery and wiped the System partition and cleared dalvik/cache. Then I flashed the CM10 zip using twrp, cleared dalvik/cache, and rebooted. Now, I'm stuck at the CM boot animation again, just like last time. This does not seem terribly complicated, and I don't know what I've done wrong.
I understand twrp cannot flash the boot due to S-ON, but I thought flashing the boot from inside my Sense rom using Flash Image GUI would fix the problem. I restored the Sense nandroid like before, rebooted, and then I got the Recovery boot logo (htc logo, with red text underneath). After maybe a minute, that went away, and I got a Sprint logo and then the normal boot screen with only an HTC logo. The phone then restarted, and this process repeated several times. So, apparently whatever I did to the boot sector with Flash Image GUI wreaked whatever was there before, and failed to replace it with something that would play nice with CM.
A factory reset won't fix the boot, will it? All it will do is overwrite my system partition and internal sd with the default files, and I still won't be able to boot. Any idea what I've screwed up, and how I can fix it?
EDIT:
I reflashed the CM10 zip, and it still gets stuck at the CM boot logo (spinning blue thing). What are the chances my CM10 download is corrupt? Is it worth trying to redownload it, reflash boot with fastboot, then move the new zip to the phone and flash that?
What version of twrp are you using, some people have had issues with the older 2.1.8
Ok, progress. I'm on twrp 2.2.1. I wiped everything again (wiped cache and dalvik, Factory Reset, and then wiped System) and reflashed CM10. It booted this time, so I assume the boot partition is fine. Apparently I'm the retard that can't understand a point-and-click system and follow simple directions
Once it boots, however, I instantly see an error "Unfortunately, the process com.android.phone has stopped." Once I click Ok, the error will either pop back up immediately, or wait for an indefinite period and them come back. Possibly this is the result of the CM10 release not being entirely stable as of yet, I don't know.
But thanks again, your help and your fantastic Don't Panic post together fixed the problem. I think I can figure out what is going on with this error popup and fix it. So long as I have voice service in the interim, which I do, all is well in the world.
It's normal, it pops up when you lose signal, its a bug but its technically a feature. If the phone loses signal, normally android is supposed to prompt you so you are aware. I think its for debugging purposes, normally this is disabled. Not sure if its really a bug in cm or they just haven't gotten around to disabling it, but its normal. It's not a real priority either since it doesn't adversly affect the phone
Hmm. This just gets better and better. So CM10 ran nicely for awhile, then last night I rebooted the phone and the internal SD card failed to mount. Both twrp and the actual OS cannot get it to mount properly. Is this something I broke, or does it sometimes occur at random? I read the following, but I don't quite know where to go with it.
om4 said:
You're card is beyond a simple reformat, the physical address linking the card and or entire card is corrupt. Don't panic, you have to start clean. Back up the info on you external or remove it, make sure you have a ROM available on your PC. Go into recovery and repartition your phone, this will wipe all memory. You then load up a working ROM (a bad back up may be responsible or just reintroduce the problem), after you have flashed the ROM (HBOOT 1.15+ must fastboot kernel, unless S-OFF) go ahead and boot into android and restore your apps.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Repartitioning seems simple enough; twrp> advanced >partition SD card>swipe (leaving all settings default).
After that, I can flash the new rom and boot using fastboot from my PC, right? I'm confident that my nandroid of the stock rom is clean, because I didn't develop this problem until after I had been using CM10 for awhile. Could I use fastboot to flash the boot, data, and system from the nandroid, and be good to go? If not, is the most current file avalible to download at http://stockroms.net/file/HTCEvo4GLTE/RUU? the appropriate file I would need to restore the phone to its stock unrooted state.?
Also, none of my nandroid files have a .img file extension. Is this normal? It has the normal .md5 files, but everything else has a .win extention. I've never heard of this one. My boot, for example, seems to be backed up as boot.emmc.win, with a boot.emmc.win.md5 corresponding to it. Cache, data, and system backups are named <option>.ext4.win. Does ext4 has something to do with the filesystem of the backed up partition? If this is the case, what is a .emmc? Can I flash these files with their strange (to me, at least) extensions using fastboot as if they were all .img files?
I can't imagine any of this is really as complicated as it seems. I've used a PC and a jailbroken iDevice extensively, and never managed to break something I couldn't fix. I guess Android just doesn't like me, or something.
Thanks again for all your help.
EDIT:
Apparently physically removing the external SD from the phone allowed me to mount the internal SD as a USB device. The phone still refused to allow me to read/write data to the memory, but somehow managed to allow my PC to see it. I formatted the internal SD to fat32 (one of the limited options) using Windows, and rebooted the phone to recovery. Now, it suddenly can detect its internal SD. I was able to wipe everything, and restore my Cyanogen backup and the SD card now works again. Weird...
Since I didn't have to repartition anything, was the "physical address linking the card and or entire card" corrupt, or did I have some other issue? Also, I'm still curious about my above question pertaining to file extensions and restoring a nandroid via fastboot.
I was trying to install a new ROM and somehow something went wrong with mounting my data drive. I did a full odin recover and still nothing, just stuck at the Samsung slash screen. Any ideas?
? Odin doesn't do recovery, are you sure you know what you've done?
Best read the basics in general, stickies. Follow the guide to return to stock, ensure you factory reset before you flash.
Need a bit more info than that. What rom did you have before, what did you flash, how did you do it, does it go into recovery and if so, does it show any error message, how do you know it's the /data partition that's not getting mounted.
If its really the /data partition, you can try to go into recovery, get adb connected and mount that partition manually. In my S3 it's on /dev/block/mmcblk0p12
I do believe odin does restore /data, if so, that's not your problem.
Doesn't do /efs though. I had a similliar problem once with the /esf partition. Had to manually format and copy it's files back. Only then my phone booted properly again.
I think you are both confused between odin and either kies or nandroid.
Odin will only write over whole partitions, it won't backup or restore anything unless you've created a flashable partition image. Make sure you know what you're doing as odin can be the fastest way to hard brick your phone.
Hi,
My mom has an Asus TF300T running JB 4.2.1. She tried to root and flash OmniROM by herself and borked it somehow. Unfortunately, she didn't do any backup...
She entered the fastboot screen and there she selected wipe. Then she flashed openrecovery-twrp-2.6.3.0-tf300tg-JB.blob using fastboot.
Now I am trying to help her rescue it.
It's operational, the OS loads up fine and she can use it, install apps etc.
I can get to the fastboot screen and from there to the TWRP no problem, but TWRP can't mount anything besides system.
No dalvik partition, no data partition, not even the SD or external SD.
Naturally, I can't flash another rom...
Tried executing "fix permissions" from the TWRP menu, it didn't help.
Downloaded the latest official Asus blob file TF300T-US_epad-10_6_1_27_5-UpdateLauncher.zip and flashed it using fastboot, hoping it will restore the missing partitions but it didn't make any difference.
Also tried CWM - same issue.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Sefi
chompy18 said:
Hi,
My mom has an Asus TF300T running JB 4.2.1. She tried to root and flash OmniROM by herself and borked it somehow. Unfortunately, she didn't do any backup...
She entered the fastboot screen and there she selected wipe. Then she flashed openrecovery-twrp-2.6.3.0-tf300tg-JB.blob using fastboot.
Now I am trying to help her rescue it.
It's operational, the OS loads up fine and she can use it, install apps etc.
I can get to the fastboot screen and from there to the TWRP no problem, but TWRP can't mount anything besides system.
No dalvik partition, no data partition, not even the SD or external SD.
Naturally, I can't flash another rom...
Tried executing "fix permissions" from the TWRP menu, it didn't help.
Downloaded the latest official Asus blob file TF300T-US_epad-10_6_1_27_5-UpdateLauncher.zip and flashed it using fastboot, hoping it will restore the missing partitions but it didn't make any difference.
Also tried CWM - same issue.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Sefi
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That sounds pretty bad. The factory blob flashed successfully? If it did, did it just bootloop and then you tried another custom recovery? I'm thinking if the factory blob flashed successfully and it didn't work, your only hope beyond sending it in to them would be to use NVflash. However, pretty sure you had to set up NVflash before anything else or an older update for it to work, can't remember off the top of my head. Props to your mom trying to install Omni though. Hope this doesn't deter her from trying on something else. These tablets are a little different than most devices and I had to read a lot to make sure I had everything lined up properly when I've worked on them for customers.
es0tericcha0s said:
That sounds pretty bad. The factory blob flashed successfully? If it did, did it just bootloop and then you tried another custom recovery? I'm thinking if the factory blob flashed successfully and it didn't work, your only hope beyond sending it in to them would be to use NVflash. However, pretty sure you had to set up NVflash before anything else or an older update for it to work, can't remember off the top of my head. Props to your mom trying to install Omni though. Hope this doesn't deter her from trying on something else. These tablets are a little different than most devices and I had to read a lot to make sure I had everything lined up properly when I've worked on them for customers.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi,
Thanks for your reply.
Yeah the factory blob flashed fine. I can use the device (the OS loads up), I can get into fastboot and from there to TWRP.
There is no backup, and from what I'v read about NVflash, you need to set it up before anything else...
I was hoping the factory blob would recover the partitions...
Is there a way to repartition it?
Maybe using fastboot erase for the data partition?
I guess maybe I am not sure of the exact nature of the issue. If /data was not mounted, you would not be able to install apps. Does it show the proper info in Settings / Storage? Have never seen a device that had the data partition unmount and still be able to use normally while booted.
Hi!!
I am no stranger to running custom Android ROMs, but this is the first time I have dealt with storage encryption. My phone is rooted, S-OFF, TWRP recovery installed.
Of course, now that my Internal Storage is encrypted, I cannot access my new ROM .zip file from TWRP recovery to flash a new ROM.
I think I need to do some sort of wipe/reset to disable encryption, but I don't want to proceed without a clear understanding of what I need to do. Any ideas??!?!
Never mind.
Solution, in case anyone stumbles into the same issue:
Flash stock recovery, perform factory reset, load new ROM.zip, re-flash TWRP, flash away!
Hi everyone,
Think I have confused myself from reading to much.
I have done the rooting now looking at doing Nandroid backup before going any further, which requires TWRP or CWM from what I have gathered I need to flash install with ODIN due to being a Samsung.
Will flashing TWRP or CWM erase my data? Looking at change the partition which requires flashing and states to do a backup as everything will be erased, so no sure if it will
Thanks for any help.
jecatch said:
Hi everyone,
Think I have confused myself from reading to much.
I have done the rooting now looking at doing Nandroid backup before going any further, which requires TWRP or CWM from what I have gathered I need to flash install with ODIN due to being a Samsung.
Will flashing TWRP or CWM erase my data? Looking at change the partition which requires flashing and states to do a backup as everything will be erased, so no sure if it will
Thanks for any help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Installing a custom TWRP/CWM recovery doesn't wipe any data. However, to be on a safer side, you should take a backup.
Regards.