Jump to content

Data-safe Disaster Recovery


Recommended Posts

Guest Rusty!
Posted (edited)

OK so on Sunday whilst pissing about, I flashed a broken recovery to my phone. This resulted in a near brick, the phone wouldn't boot at all, and wouldn't even enter Smartflash. I didn't have a recent backup, so needless to say I was pissed.

However, this presented me with a challenge, could I recover my phone without losing anything? Turns out the answer was yes :D

I was able to NVFlash (battery out, hold both vol keys and plug in USB) over a good recovery, and the phone booted straight to it, from there I restored the old boot.img that I had, rebooted and held my breath.

Success! OK, so wifi didn't work due to the old kernel, but whatever, quick CM reflash fixed that (in hindsight, I could probably have just done that straight away anyway).

I created a little batch menu system to handle the command and let you pick from an internal or external recovery (depending on what you normally use) and a couple scripts for Linux users. Hopefully anyone that has bust their phone to the point of NVFlashing will be able to do this instead and keep all their stuff :)

http://www.mediafire.com/file/p4t99yy1qn5435g/o2x-nvflash-recovery-v5.rar

Edited by Rusty!
Guest Anil K Solanki
Posted

OK so on Sunday whilst pissing about, I flashed a broken recovery to my phone. This resulted in a near brick, the phone wouldn't boot at all, and wouldn't even enter Smartflash. I didn't have a recent backup, so needless to say I was pissed.

Hi Russ, thanks for the mini guide. Could you clarify what you meant by a broken recovery? I have fairly good idea what you mean, I just want to be certain, because you build recoveries, and you flashing something that's broken, is, surprising. We're all human after all.

Anil.

Guest Rusty!
Posted (edited)

I made a change to the init.rc in the ramdisk*, nothing to do with a 'normal' build. It was an experiment that didn't go too well :D

*Split the recovery image, edit ramdisk, re-combine.

Edit: I didn't expect that a corrupt/broken recovery would ruin (temporarily) the phone. I thought worst case scenario would be just dd the working one again. Oops. Still it's good that it happened as I learned this from it, which is quite useful.

Edited by Rusty!
  • 1 month later...

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.