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Root I really need help! stuck in recovery, can't recover anything

jimmy956

Lurker
Aug 23, 2010
8
0
I was running aloysius v12, tried flashing purehero 2.1, and got stuck on the white skateboarder boot screen. Pulled battery, tried recovering my nandroid backups, (use clockwork mod), and whenever I try recovering my backups, i get a "Error while flashing boot image!" message, and it stops.

I've tried flashing just the regular Aloysius2.0v12 file, not a backup, and i get:

Copying files...
E:Can't symlink /system/xbin/[
E:Failure at line 10:
symlink busybox SYSTEM:xbin/[
Installation aborted.

The only thing I can do from here is try to flash something else, or reboot. I can't get past the recovery screen.

I'm not sure where to go from here. Someone told me to install amon ra instead of clockwork, and to flash a new rom from there, but I don't know if that'll be the right way to go about it or even how to do that. Sorry for being such a noob, and i'm sure this problem is in a thread somewhere else but i looked all over and couldn't find it. Anyone who can tell me how to get my Eris running again would be highly appreciated. Thanks!
 
Jimmy,
Had the same problem recently using Amon's recovery. If possible boot into recovery. Mount USB to computer. back up everything on sd card to a folder on your desktop. After confirmed back up, then do a factory wipe, dalvik cache wipe, (battery and rotate wipe for good measure.) Then wipe your sd card. If you need apps2sd, partition as ext2 and then after complete convert to ext 3 in partition menu. Reboot recovery.

In Recovery re-mount usb to pc. Drag and drop your roms/nandroids onto the sd card and dismount.

Try and recover nandroids. If none still work, flash a clean rom and then once inside that do a backup and try again.

Hope this helps man. Worked for me. Good Luck :thinking:
 
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If you flash a lot of ROMs without clearing the cache and the Dalvik cache, then you'll run into issues like this. Sometimes it will boot but you'll get force closes galore. You need to clear the cache as often as possible.

I don't like factory resets; no one does. But I would try clearing the caches first before doing the factory reset. If that doesn't work, then do the factory reset.
 
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Pure[SIZE=+1]Hero[/SIZE] 2.1 ?

There are Eris ports of that, but the PureHero 2.1 ROM is not for the Eris - there's your problem right there.

I don't know if I would go so far as to re-format your SD card, but making a backup of it certainly will not hurt anything, and is a good idea anyway if you have not already done that.

If your original Nandroid backups were made successfully, you can recover your phone by applying the Leak-V3 ROM or the "Official RUU" to it, and then re-rooting exactly the way you rooted the phone the first time around.

Then, boot to recovery and restore (one of) the Nandroid backups that are already on your SD card.

( If you attempt flashing an image to a partition which is too small (because you used a ROM from the wrong phone, for instance), it can make those partitions unmountable, and there is no way that Nandroid can overcome that problem (ask me how I know). Fortunately, applying a factory ROM (Leak-V3) via the PB00IMG.ZIP method or the RUU ("Official 2.1 RUU") causes all partitions to be recreated. )

If a Nandroid restore doesn't work after re-creating and re-rooting your phone, at that point in time you can try re-formatting your SD card.


Good Luck

eu1


PS: Make sure your phone is very well charged before you flash any ROM or restore any Nandroid backup. And always "Wipe data/factory reset" before you flash a ROM from the SD card.
 
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The issue didnt' sound to me like an incompatible ROM. Maybe as to the boot loop, but not the inability to recover nandroids. He said he couldn't restore any backups so I would assume he was doing a factory reset before any restores anyway? i do this everytime I do a nandroid recovery just to make sure I get a clean flash of the nandroid.

The problem that I had with nandroid not recovering any backups was supposedly due to not having enough free space on the sd card. Backing up and reformatting worked for me.
 
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The issue didnt' sound to me like an incompatible ROM. Maybe as to the boot loop, but not the inability to recover nandroids. He said he couldn't restore any backups so I would assume he was doing a factory reset before any restores anyway? i do this everytime I do a nandroid recovery just to make sure I get a clean flash of the nandroid.

The problem that I had with nandroid not recovering any backups was supposedly due to not having enough free space on the sd card. Backing up and reformatting worked for me.

I wasn't diagnosing what happened on your phone, only what the OP was going through.

As I said, if you use flash_image (Nandroid uses this too) with an image which is too big to fit in an existing partition, bad things happen to your phone which Nandroid is unable to deal with during subsequent uses. It is quite possible to create a situation where Nandroid no longer works - even though everything is perfectly fine with the SD card and the Nandroid backup restore set that is on it.

Note that Nand creates an MD5 checksum file. That's for a reason - so that the files can be checked for corruption before Nand attempts to restore them. So, when an error occurs as the OP described, the first thing to suspect is the phone, not the SD card.

The fact that the OP appears to have flashed a ROM which was never intended for the Eris makes the probability of damaged/100% full file systems a distinct possibility.

In any event, the recovery method that I suggested will work for 99.9% of all cases - generally, if the bootloader is still working, the phone can be recovered even if the boot, system, data, and recovery partitions are badly damaged. But this is only possible because it appears that the RUU/PB00IMG.ZIP (HBOOT) methods actually cause the bootloader to re-create the flash partitioning.


eu1
 
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yeah... just seemed easier to try a clean recovery before reflashing and rerooting. just my 2 cents. Do you normally factory wipe before restoring your nandroids?

When Nandroid unpacks "system.img" and "data.img" from a previous backup, the first thing it does is mount /system and /data (respectively), and deletes every file in those file systems. ( "boot.img" is written to its' partition as a raw write: just a stream of bytes without a file system ).

So, "Wipes" (of any kind) are superfluous before a Nand restore.

That also means that you can not "overlay" Nandroid restores as you can with the "Flash from SD" method of installing software.

It doesn't hurt anything at all to do a wipe beforehand, so maybe it's better to just tell newbs "Always do a wipe before flashing!", so they don't have to worry about the distinction between flashing of a ROM with "Flash from SD" and a Nand restore.


[SIZE=+2]Always do a wipe before flashing![/SIZE]


eu1


.
 
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shoot... I tried the leak v3, and as it was updating the boot and system updates failed... Then it asked if I wanted to reboot, and only gave me a "yes" option. It shut off, and now won't turn back on, won't boot into recovery, anything. Did I just brick my phone completely?


Maybe. Did you charge your phone before attempting the above?

What were the exact messages that appeared on your phone when the "failure" happened. (Please refer to the images/figures in this post when you do that)

Here are your next steps.

For an abundance of caution, remove the USB cable from the phone, pull the battery, press all the buttons on the phone one at a time, re-insert the battery, put the back case on, and plug the phone into the A/C charger.

Charge your phone to 100% - nothing less than that (amber light turns to green)

Leave the phone plugged in to the A/C charger and:

Repeat the Leak-V3 HBOOT+PB00IMG.ZIP install

There is a chance you have a brick, but let's charge your phone all the way up first, and re-try the Leak-V3 (HBOOT) install.


eu1


[ Edit ] There are several ways to determine if the phone's bootloader is still working; all of them involve powering the phone up with special key sequences, starting from a power-off state.

1) Press and hold down the Send & End keys until the screen lights up (press the Send key before the End key, but keep pressing both) - do you get a "FASTBOOT" or "FASTBOOT USB" display?

2) Press and hold down the Vol-Down & End keys until the screen lights up (press the Vol-Down key before the End key, but keep pressing both) - this should start the HBOOT + PB00IMG.ZIP process (you can pull the battery at the point where it asks you for input if you want to avoid it attempting another flash - just be careful not to press any buttons when pulling the back off of the phone).

Seeing both of these indicates that the bootloader is still functioning - if you can't get either of them to appear, your phone is dead.
 
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I had my phone charging for a couple hours before I tried it.

In picture number 9 in that post, next to boot and system, instead of "ok" it said "Fail-PU" in red. I don't remember whether userdata was "ok" or "fail-pu"

And when I plug it into the charger, there's not a charging light at all. But it's currently plugged in, after pulling the battery and pushing all the buttons. I've tried different button combinations and it won't respond at all, just completely black, but I'll try again.

Alright, tried both of your key combinations, and nothing happened, the screen doesn't turn on at all. Sounds like I have a brick... lovely.

I'm still under warranty, so looks like I'll be talking to VZW today. Bummer, but hopefully they won't pry into it and see that I've been messing with it haha. Thanks all for your help! Sorry I'm such a newb, trying to learn though.
 
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I had my phone charging for a couple hours before I tried it.

In picture number 9 in that post, next to boot and system, instead of "ok" it said "Fail-PU" in red. I don't remember whether userdata was "ok" or "fail-pu"

And when I plug it into the charger, there's not a charging light at all. But it's currently plugged in, after pulling the battery and pushing all the buttons. I've tried different button combinations and it won't respond at all, just completely black, but I'll try again.

Alright, tried both of your key combinations, and nothing happened, the screen doesn't turn on at all. Sounds like I have a brick... lovely.

I'm still under warranty, so looks like I'll be talking to VZW today. Bummer, but hopefully they won't pry into it and see that I've been messing with it haha. Thanks all for your help! Sorry I'm such a newb, trying to learn though.

Ouch. Very sorry to hear that.

The Eris's battery discharges rather quickly when it is in either HBOOT or FASTBOOT mode - even if it is plugged into the A/C charger, it will not charge in those modes. Why it would not charge when it was completely turned off is beyond me, though.

The thing that seems rather strange to me is that even if the flashing of the System and Boot partitions failed, the flashing of the HBOOT area had to have succeeded. (It is not possible for you to have reached the stage where you were observing that screen without a working HBOOT - it is the very first thing which is flashed in the HBOOT+PB00IMG.ZIP process, and you are actually seeing the newly-replaced bootloader "live" at the point in time when it is flashing the new partitions.)

I wonder if the battery is just dead. You will know when you go to the Verizon store (if they swap out batteries to test it). OTOH, it still won't boot at that point (according to your prior posts), so... I don't know what a perfunctory inspection at a VZW retail store will reveal.

Let us know what VZW does for you.

eu1


PS - I am checking a few things (which won't help you out any, but we might collectively learn from this) - what was the exact version of the HERO ROM that you flashed? - It seems that Konikub has 8 differently themed ROMs on his "PureHero 2.1 (6-06)" page.
 
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It was the PureHero-2.1_SnowOC - the Snow Maps edition overclocked

And I'm going to try swapping the battery... my friend has an Eris so maybe with his charged battery it might work? Worth a shot before taking it into Verizon. So basically I need to try installing the v3 leak again, right?

Thanks for the info.

If it boots up, then yeah, try that as a last resort. Make sure your friend's battery is charged to 100% before you try putting it in your Eris.

eu1
 
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I wouldn't go to the store. I would call 611 and troubleshoot with CS

I wish just going to say the same thing. It's probably better if you can jump through the hoops over the phone and hopefully have them send you a replacement. You never know what could happen if you go in store and let them play around with it. I wish you the best of luck.
 
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