69 replies to this topic

[Ereptor]

Hi guys,

As you could have read it, my friend's g300 is sort of ... bricked. I did everything that the guides told us to get Infusion's ICS rom on his phone, we downloaded and installed the stock ICS from Huawei, rooted it, etc.

For some time, it was great. After a week or two though, he found that his phone shut down and when he powered it on, it only showed the splash screen. When I get into the recovery, it writes:

E: Can't mount /cache/recovery/command
E: Can't mount /cache/recovery/log
E: Can't open /cache/recovery/log
E: Can't mount /cache/recovery/last_log
E: Can't open /cache/recovery/last_log

It shows everytime when I do any function call in the recovery.
I thought that reflashing a recovery would help. Unfortunately it didn't, it said that the installation was successful, but the recovery didn't get flashed itself, when I restart the phone the old (and corrupted) recovery comes back. The recovery version that I used is "CWM-based Recovery" v4.0.1.5 .

I tried to TPT the stock ROMs from Huawei's website (via the volume up-down and power on method), but at around 30% the installation stops.

My last idea was trying to flash a recovery via fastboot, but when I do it closes with a warning:


sending 'recovery' (5898 KB)...
OKAY [  0.565s]
writing 'recovery'...
FAILED (remote: flash write failure)
finished. total time: 87.952s


And I'm pretty much out of ideas. As far as I know as long as the phone can be turned on it's not literally bricked, but I just can't get it back to life. Any ideas? It would help a lot.

Thanks!

Edit:

One more thing. He mentioned that whenever he shut the phone down and then powered it on in the morning, it went straight to the recovery without holding the volume up button. I don't know why he didn't mention it when things were still working, but I can't go back in time, I guess...

Edited by Ereptor, 02 October 2012 - 05:02 PM.

[Ereptor]

Boy, the suspense is killing me...

Anyways, it's been a long day, I'll check back tomorrow if there was a good advice. If not, I guess I'll just have to tell him that his phone is a brick. Lesson learned: *never* tweak someone else's phone, because out of the blue things can get ugly.

And sorry about the double post, I'd just like to have the information separated from the hidden bump.

[wrtease]

just try a different sdcard and start again.

[Hogweed]

Hmm. Try booting first with no SD card. Probably won't help but worth a try as it is simple. Next try to manually mount cache in CWM recovery. If that doesn't work try wipe cache and/or format and attempt to remount. You could also try mounting system partition in CWM to check that it can do it. Hopefully you just have a corrupt cache partition. Do not try more general wipes/formats/resets just yet but they may be needed depending on what's actually wrong.

At the moment it seems you still have CWM and an intact recovery partition at the least. Don't lose it! No more attempts to flash CWM. It is not a problem with CWM.

It might also be possible to use fastboot and/or adb commands from a PC to sort this out.  "Fastboot erase cache" possibly might do the trick but I've not tried this myself

Edited by Hogweed, 02 October 2012 - 06:36 PM.

[Ereptor]

Okay, just a little feedback:

- Mounting cache is a no go. I tried to wipe it, format it, and in the end even erase it via fastboot, but it's still unmountable.
- The system partition can be mounted in CWM though. As a matter of fact, every other partition can be, except for the dreadful cache.
- adb doesn't recognize the phone. I'm on a mac though, so I'll try to install the sdk and tools on my windows machine and see it it's only the drivers or something else.
- And in the end, I doubt that it's something related to the sd card. Sorry that I didn't mention it in my first post, but the guy doesn't even have an sd card, when we installed stuff, we used mine. Still, I tried to format mine and start with a fresh one, but now it's unmountable, yet another reason to try with Windows.

That's it so far, thanks for the suggestions, and keep them coming, I could really use them.

By the way, I'm starting to wonder if it's a bad block that causes the problems, what do you think?

Edit:
I tried the adb from Windows too, it's not working. I guess the ADB-debugging was turned off on his device, and it still remembers it. I understand that adb can't be used from the bootloader, but then how can I tinker with it?

Edit2:
Elementary Watson, from the recovery...

Edited by Ereptor, 03 October 2012 - 08:51 AM.

[Hogweed]

What we need here is someone with more low level knowledge. Hopefully someone can drop in on the thread. I could offer suggestions but I would be taking a stab in the dark as I have never tried to repartition the phone.

[tillaz]

you should check if the eMMC is fried

follow this guide to find out (if so, send it back under warranty)

http://forum.xda-dev...d.php?t=1284196

[Ereptor]

Thanks for the posts guys. The eMMC doesn't seem to be fried, I get a long log, but none of the lines contains any of the strings that imply a corrupted eMMC. At least now I know that it's not a hardware failure, so it should be "resurrectable".

And don't worry about it Hogweed, your advices were helpful so far, while I didn't exactly bring her back to life, I still hold some hope for it at least.

Okay, someone (with a different phone) resolved a similar problem with flashing the stock recovery. Since I really have no better idea, I think I'll try the same with the superrecovery from the adb shell, and pray that it works. I'll update the post when I'm done saving/bricking the phone. Wish me luck!

Edited by Ereptor, 03 October 2012 - 01:29 PM.

[Hogweed]

It is possible a forced update might work (don't know how official updates behave with a corrupted cache partition though) using a pre-update package first known as the "middle package" (or upgrade/downgrade tool) but I am still hopeful someone will pop along with the adb commands to recreate the filesystem in linux. I could have a stab at it but I'm not willing to scrub my internal partitions to check it works :-)  Hopefully someone who knows for certain will comment.

Edited by Hogweed, 03 October 2012 - 01:22 PM.

[Hogweed]

If it is any help /dev/block/mmcblk0p6 is mounted (ext4) as /cache on my G300 so that's where you need to recreate a filesystem.

The adb shell command hopefully is a simple as mke2fs command.

Edited by Hogweed, 03 October 2012 - 01:38 PM.

[Ereptor]

So, in theory, if I just repartition the /cache partition, I should be good to go?

If so, some Google search might actually solve the problem.

Update:

Flashing the superrecovery via adb quit with an error status -1, error scanning partitions.

Edited by Ereptor, 03 October 2012 - 01:39 PM.

[Hogweed]

I am hopeful that the partition table is intact and just recreating the filesystem with mke2fs command should work. Just getting the right arguments.

Might be worth just trying  mke2fs /dev/block/mmcblk0p6

Edited by Hogweed, 03 October 2012 - 01:44 PM.

[Hogweed]

Don't try to flash a new recovery as that is fine. Can you issue adb shell commands?

Edited by Hogweed, 03 October 2012 - 01:51 PM.

[Ereptor]

Thanks for the tip, it didn't work. It was worth a shot though.

[Hogweed]

Ereptor, on 03 October 2012 - 01:52 PM, said:

Thanks for the tip, it didn't work. It was worth a shot though.

What did it say?

[Ereptor]

Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=1024 (log=0)
Fragment size=1024 (log=0)
49152 inodes, 196608 blocks
9830 blocks (5%) reserved for the super user
First data block=1
Maximum filesystem blocks=262144
24 block groups
8192 blocks per group, 8192 fragments per group
2048 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
8193, 24577, 40961, 57345, 73729


And yeah, I can at last, I did the mke2fs command from adb. I hope that's where I should have done it:)

[Hogweed]

Now reboot recovery (or phone if feeling lucky)

Edited by Hogweed, 03 October 2012 - 01:57 PM.

[Ereptor]

I did, the problem persists. The same old E: can't mount ... errors.

I tried it again with adb's reboot. The same thing. I know repartitioning again and again (especially with an unstable phone which reboots from time to time, it totally crashed and rebooted on me the first time) isn't exactly safe, but I wanted to make sure it's the same this way. And I wanted to make sure that nothing changed either, and nope, the partition still has the same info as ever.

So, what I got from it that the problem isn't really the cache partition, or is it?

(If I'm feeling lucky? Boy, I'm kind of ambivalent on that one, I did things that should have made the phone explode and nothing happened, but it's still not working, so... )

Edit:

By the way, when I try to mount the cache partition in adb shell, I get an "invalid argument" error. I can mount all the other partitions except for this one (which makes sense, but I really don't get what's its problem with the arguments).

Edited by Ereptor, 03 October 2012 - 02:13 PM.

[Hogweed]

Hmm, do you have an old nandroid backup? I wonder if you can "fastboot flash cache cache.img" from a backup.

I emailed Dazzozo to see if he can take a look at this thread but he may be busy or unavailable.

Edited by Hogweed, 03 October 2012 - 02:23 PM.

[Ereptor]

Unfortunately not, as I said the sd card isn't his, so when the rom seemed to work all right, I deleted everything from the card.

Thank you, your help so far is much appreciated!

Edited by Ereptor, 03 October 2012 - 02:25 PM.