Root Phone won't boot - please help me!!

[mrhappy5]

Hi.

My phone has been complaining of low storage for ages. I swithed to CM7 to get rid of the preinstalled cruft Orange left on it, that helped. But it got filled again. I've used Titanium Backup Pro to convert some apps like Facebook to system apps, so they are integrated into the ROM and not taking up valuable space. That worked, shortterm. I've regularly cleared down the Dalvik cahce, but this only really helps after the phone's been up for a a while.

Various functions have been beginning to fail recenlty, like not being able to access settings for live wallpapers and tts, and this afternoon the storage got so low that even e the messenger would not work, giving a Force Close error. I rebooted the phone and now it won't boot at all, getting stuck in an endless cyycle at the boot/splash screen. Nightmare!

Firstly, assuming that it cannot boot because there is literally no free storage space, is there any way I can access the phone's internall memory to make some space, via USB maybe? I need to do this to backup things like contacts, message storage and settings.

Secondly, how do I go about cleaning up my phone and fixing the force close errors (I realise this is probably not straight forward) without having to reset and start from the beginning? (Is it worth it, or should I just reinstall the ROM having backed up what I need?)

The handset is really let down by the puny amount of internal memory, which is a shame!

Any help or advice gratefully received! Cheers

Rooted HTC Desire Bravo with CyanogenMod 7.0.3 and ClockworkMod Recovery 5.0.2.0

 

[mrhappy5]

Just been reading this for some clues. Would it be possible that the boot partition ha somehow become corrupt? If it is, is there any way I can restore just the boot partition from a zip? It seems that's possible, but I don't know where to get just the boot data from (in recovery-sip format).

Cheers

 

[mrhappy5]

Ok, I just attempted to restore /boot from a nandroid backup from about 6 months ago - this may or may not be after I rooted and flashed CM7, I can't remember - anyway, it succeeded but still doesn't boot, now sitting on the white HTC screen as opposed to the CM7 splash.

Whoops.

I tried then tried to restore /boot from a backup I took last night (note, the phone was already not booting by then), but it won't do it because the MD5 hashes don't match (why not?!).

 

[SUroot]

the MD5 hashes don't match (why not?!).

Corrupt.

Have you done a factory reset? If not, I would do.

 

[mrhappy5]

Corrupt.

Have you done a factory reset? If not, I would do.

No I haven't just yet but that would solve all my problems!

I didn't want to resort to that yet because I want to get to my text messages to back them up. If I can do that, I will happily to a rest and upgrade to CM7.1.

Can you advise on how I can achieve the above?

Cheers

Edit: I've found a boot.img file in the CyanogenMod7.0.3 ROM zip, how can I flash this to the phone to restore the boot partition (will that work?)

 

[SUroot]

That won't work no. Your boot.img you have is fine. I assume its a userdata problem.

We can probably get your sms back. I can't guide you step by step.

You must read the adb and fastboot faq I wrote. Essentially, you want to adb pull /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db

With the faq and this information you should be able to work it out. Good luck, ill check here for your progress tomorrow, but for now my bed calls

 

[mrhappy5]

You must read the adb and fastboot faq I wrote. Essentially, you want to adb pull /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db

With the faq and this information you should be able to work it out. Good luck, ill check here for your progress tomorrow, but for now my bed calls

SUroot, thank you for your help so far. I had a good read of your FAQ, which all makes good sense to me.

I have, however, recovered from the situation. By borrowing a friend's old Hero I realised that I was using an app called SMS Backup + written by Jan Berkel, which has been diligently backing up my texts to my Googlemail account in the background. I'd completely forgotten about it, but it's saved my bacon!

So I was able to do a factory reset and update the ROM at the same time and retrieve my contacts and messages from Google. Before I did that though, I partitioned my SD card and created an sd-ext partition using GParted in order to use S2E in Android to expand my data storage.

My phone is looking healthy once again, but I haven't got to experiment with adb or Fastboot. I might familiarise myself with adb for Linux and maybe Qtadb too for future reference!

Thanks again!