Hi XDA. I'm looking for help here, because i have't found anything like i need in many researches that i made. I have a qualcomm based phone that is comercialized only in my country; it's based on ZTE parts but it is sold over a brand called Vtelca.
There's litteraly any official way to flash this phone neither than an official firmware. The only thing that one can find are custom roms that are made by local coockers, based on system dumps of functional phones. There's a port of CWM that one can install in this phone over ADB. One can be able to flash CWM when the phone is operative, but if the phone has a soft brick, one can just do anything.
Theres no fastboot in this device, so one can't flash images over there, but there is a way to connect the phone that mounts all of its partitions (litteraly all of them, including the recovery one). Only linux can obviously read all of this partitions because of the filesystems, and here is my question:
Is there a way to write an image into a partition?
My theory is that if i know which of the partitions corresponds to android recovery, i 'should' be able to write the recovery image into it. Right?
Thank you in advance, even if there's no way to do this.
Related
Hi, just thinking about how to recover bricked hero's. Firstly i think only possible unbricking process would be if the phone has been rooted.
I am listing some possbile methods.
Method 1:
NOTE: Only works if you have backed up your NAND (Nanroid file somewhere)
Start the phone in recovery mode and flash your original NAND file and in theory this should unbrick the phones. After this you could just flash the phone with generic HTC Rom just to be safe.
Method 2:
Reflash the phone with recovery image from Cyanogen. Than reflash with a ROM possibly HTC generic rom.
NOTE: These are only possible (thought to be ways of unbricking)
If you can get into recovery mod and flash a ROM then the phone isn't bricked.
Just....broken
Fair enough, but i have heard it is still possible to get into recovery mode directly or even via SDK
You can often get into Recovery, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it though
i thought the only way to unbrick a phone is to jtag it?
Hey Guys,
as far as i could find out so far, you use TWRP to flash a Custom Rom from the Tablets Recovery Mode, this requires a rooted device, and to do this you flash a prerooted rom somehow, which includes TWRP already, which you then use to flash the rom you actually want on your device.
Another possibility was to flash a Kernel (with TWRP?) to get the same results...
Now I absolutely can´t find a tutorial for dummies, to do that, or find the required files.
After i found it kinda complicated to unlock the bootloader, since most of the tutorials didn´t even mention you need advanced mode and a special Google USB Driver from Sony´s Developer Page, to even get that working, i would really appreciate if someone could give me a step by step with links.
If a tutorial exists, pls give me a link as well, cause i looked the whole day yesterday, and found jack.
cheers
yes, you need to do all that. i just went through this yesterday and used this tutorial:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2747676
once you are unlocked, follow the instructions for your rom, usually to flash the boot and recovery images with fastboot. two things to watch out for though, if you are using an oreo rom make sure your twrp version is 3.2 or better, secondly, if twrp give an error where it cant mount the partitions to wipe them use the change format option under wipe/advance to change to ext4 (which essentially re-formats the partition) and you should be good to flash the rom after that.
here is another tutorial to help get adb, fastboot, and the drivers up and going:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2588979
answer yes to everything, i can't remember if i loaded in sony specific driver on top of that or not.
goodluck!
Hello Guys I am new to the community and I'm willing to learn more about phones.
My question is where is the bootloader's code stored?It cant be stored into the /boot partition as according to this the bootloader either starts the kernel, which then starts android, or the recovery mode. Inside the /boot there is only the kernel and the RAMDISK according to this. Is it inside a chipset on the motherboard? In order to be able to be unlocked the code must be editable. It cant be stored inside the /boot because sometimes you need to delete that partition in order to install custom ROM. You dont install a different bootloader....
My second question is where is the recovery mode stored? I 'm sure it is stored inside the phone's hard drive but I couldnt find any partition with that name.
Ok. I have a thrid question now. Theoritically, are we able to flash a custom ROM without unlocking the bootloader? Probably we could but due to the bootloader we won't be able to access it. Am i right? Same rules apply for custom recovery too(correct me if I'm wrong).
@PinkNinja
It depends on both whether Android is a A/B partition slots system or not and on Android version.
BTW: The XDA-thread you cited is a 1:1 copy of an article published in 2011. Today is the year 2020. Things since Android 7 have drastically changed.
What the guy above said, on a only you have a recovery partition and a bootloader stored on boot when on a/b you have both bootloader and recovery on boot partition.
On the last question, no, you cant flash custom rom with bl locked. In order to flash custom rom you need custom recovery and you can't install/boot it without unlocking bootloader because when bootloader is locked you can only flash/boot images signed by oem, that's thw whole point of bl blocking
If you are curious about your partitions you can fastboot oem partition and there you have most info, as well as in the android websitee, it's everything explained https://source.android.com/
Hey Guys,
Since it doesnt seem like anybody else is-- im trying to port TWRP to the Duo.
Problem im running into is after extracting all the partitions i dont get a "Recovery.img" partition but i get a Boot_A and Boot_B partitions.
After extracting the Boot_A partition to check for recovery.img (or something relative) theres a recovery.fstab in there.
Does anyone know how I can get the recovery.img partition? or what I might be able to do with Boot_A/B?
none24 said:
Hey Guys,
Since it doesnt seem like anybody else is-- im trying to port TWRP to the Duo.
Problem im running into is after extracting all the partitions i dont get a "Recovery.img" partition but i get a Boot_A and Boot_B partitions.
After extracting the Boot_A partition to check for recovery.img (or something relative) theres a recovery.fstab in there.
Does anyone know how I can get the recovery.img partition? or what I might be able to do with Boot_A/B?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Pretty sure that modern A/B devices usually don’t come with a separate recovery partition. In my experience it’s a part of the boot image.
filfat said:
Pretty sure that modern A/B devices usually don’t come with a separate recovery partition. In my experience it’s a part of the boot image.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Correct.
Would u know what I could do as next steps given that I only have the a/b partition? I'm not sure where to transfer the files to. Or if there's a twrp porting guide that details A/B partitions
none24 said:
Correct.
Would u know what I could do as next steps given that I only have the a/b partition? I'm not sure where to transfer the files to. Or if there's a twrp porting guide that details A/B partitions
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Im not 100% about this, but i think TWRP is dead as of the newer hardware specification in android, as it stands. You would have to package a boot image with the recovery programming, making it difficult to match up with existing setups. You would have to package for every kernel available, and hope your users dont pick the wrong one when they go to install, or else they will be stuck in a bootloop, with no way to force into recovery, because there is no recovery. I have been working on TWRP for the Unihertz Titan and have increasingly found information that TWRP if still active, is in its final days. I just bought a Duo, so there is a lot i dont know yet, but on the unihertz devices, there are tools to force your phone into preloader mode that all mediatek devices have, to flash your roms back to stock state. Even in a 100% not bootable state, you can save your device. Super slick. But if you nuke both your boot partitions by accident, there is effectively no way to recover to my knowledge, on the Duo. These tools are Very handy for developers. I am unaware of any tool that exists for the Duo that will do the same, not to say one can't or hasn't been written yet. But without someone with deep (im talking super deep) android experience, a Duo to spare, and the time and effort needed for the project, it might be safe to assume that most custom software will not arrive on the Duo, even with its ease of rooting and unlocking. I will be taking a close look at the kernel and everything else i can find to determine what will be possible for the Duo in the coming months.
Upon further research, there is a bootloader mode that does not seem to be based on boot/recovery partition. In powered off state, hold volume down and plug in to a computer. This will allow you to get into fastboot and flash anything you'd like.
So I dont have any OS on my phone, just a pc and a custom recovery. Is there a way to find out my exact build number, firmware version, etc? My build number goes: RMX2030EX_xxxx-xxxx something something. I wanna find out what's next to it cause Im seeing stock ROMs go like RMX2030EX_11_C.75_210917. The last time I flashed C73 (I remember mine started with C5x but idk what's next to it) it got EVEN MORE BRICKED so I wanna be careful now. Anyone can help me?
Edit: My custom recovery is PitchBlack.
in principle this information should be available to the recovery. But i am not aware of a recovery actually showing the data. You may do a backup of your kernel partition to a micro sd card and examine the data on your computer to find it somewhere. But I never did this before, so I do not know how easy or hard this will be.
PauSteu said:
in principle this information should be available to the recovery. But i am not aware of a recovery actually showing the data. You may do a backup of your kernel partition to a micro sd card and examine the data on your computer to find it somewhere. But I never did this before, so I do not know how easy or hard this will be.
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Click to collapse
How do I do that?
I did see my phone's codename/product which is RMX2030EX in the recovery, I also did the getprop in the terminal of it and I don't see anything that goes: RMX2030EX_11_C.75_210917. Maybe I missed it? Can you teach me how to look for it or the alternative, to back up my kernel? I only have an OTG and a USB which works in the recovery, not an SD card. Will that be okay?
At least TWRP recovery should be able to backup any partition to any storage you can mount. You did not write which custom recovery is installed. That would be an interesting information.
As I told you before I have never examined a kernel image to find the version number, but this is what I would do:
mount your kernel image on your computer
Code:
mount <filename> <mountpoint>
on Linux, on windows you may need to install additional software to do that. At least I am not aware of a windows program capable of doing that
Examine the files and find some kind of Manifest file to find the version number.
I you have acess to many or all possible Kernel images, you could do a comparison which might be faster.
oh my custom recovery is pitchblack custom recovery
koarc lkas said:
oh my custom recovery is pitchblack custom recovery
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The problem is there is a longer story behind this, I cant flash the TWRP to my phone and if I did, it just reboots and keeps rebooting, stuck in fastboot mode while rebooting so.