lost userdata - phone reset to default (running SS)

[Guest Smiff2]

ok so my sister just handed me her Blade saying its reset itself and sure enough, it's like i just flashed the rom (or the user partition was totally lost).

the ROM (was and is) Swedish Spring RLS3, it's a gen1 TFT OSF.

phone seems to work fine (?!) data on SD card fine.

bad 512MB FlashRAM perhaps?

all she says is the battery went flat. pretty sure no one f**ked with clockwork (or would know how to!).

anything i should do before i start restoring everything?

was i imagining that the market could restore your (market installed) apps?

i guess i could take this opportunity to update to the latest SS release but that wasn't really on my todo, RLS3 was working ok (i know it was OC, could that be related ..?)

thanks..

Edited May 29, 2011 by Smiff2

[Guest Smiff2]

ahh the SD card was filled. could this somehow cause the data loss?

[Guest lakicamm]

Did you try simple reboot? I had similar symptoms after some installations, but reboot solved em :P

[Guest Smiff2]

yeah the phone was off, so after 2 boots no sign of userdata.

anyway it seems to be working.

would like to avoid happening again though!

edit: i forgot to mention the most odd thing:

after i flashed SSRLS3, i also flashed some addons and the Gingerbread-ThinCircle Blue theme.

so the weird thing was, the phone had reverted to default SS (froyo) theme. i thought the theme addons were flashed to the system partition overwriting the originals, so how is this possible?

i am not sure if the other addons like dialer were lost, didn't look sorry.

Edited May 29, 2011 by Smiff2

[Guest Ralph Martin]

Is there an Image folder on the SD which caused an accidental TPT?

[Guest Smiff2]

Is there an Image folder on the SD which caused an accidental TPT?

excellent q. i may have put the repartitioning tpt on there (never used) .. need to check.

presumably that would boot with Vol+ ? doesnt it have some confirmation before it does anything.. i've never run it.

thanks!

[Guest Ralph Martin]

excellent q. i may have put the repartitioning tpt on there (never used) .. need to check.

presumably that would boot with Vol+ ?

Yes. But it's not that hard to do accidentally if you squeeze the sides of the phone while powering it on.

doesnt it have some confirmation before it does anything...

Nope. It merrily overwrites everything without any confirmation at all!

[Guest Smiff2]

doesn't make sense either as the partioning img i downlaoded was supposed to be "lossless" i.e. it would preserve userdata.

i need to get back on the phone and check what i put there.. only a stock TPT image of SS should do this surely? pretty sure i didn't download one..

[Guest Ralph Martin]

I don't know what TPT you used, but anything which alters the size of the data (or any other) partition will in general trash all existing data in that partition.

[Guest Smiff2]

the partition script i was going to use - i ran it once with Clockwork but never applied the result - is

http://android.modaco.com/content/zte-blad...ol-alpha3-gen1/

so even if the TPT created back then was later applied by her accidentally, it shouldn't have had this result?

here's my current theory of what happened

1) i download and run the partition script and then forget about it, leaving the tpt image on the sd

2) one day the phone battery runs down, she turns it on accidentally holding vol+

3) the battery is flat so the tpt doesn't finish and somehow gets as far as installing the system (without some of the addons like theme) and doesn't restore the userdata either..

is this plausible?

if so we're pretty lucky it wasn't a brick.

what's an easy to check partition sizes please? that would show if they've been edited..

Edited May 30, 2011 by Smiff2

[Guest Phoenix Silver]

download a terminal emulator from market

run it

type df

enter

[Guest Smiff2]

yep, system is 134784 and data is 290MB so it must have run a tpt.

i've renamed a folder on the SD called /image to /image-bak - will this prevent the TPT running again?

[Guest Ralph Martin]

Should do. It specifically looks for a directory called image.

[Guest Smiff2]

ok thanks.

moral of this story:

don't leave a TPT image on your SD card. it's dangerous!