Hi all,

I've been attempting to flash lineageos on my 6T following this guidance: https://lineageosroms.com/fajita/#installation

I got to step 6 on the second section Temporarily booting a custom recovery using fastboot (https://lineageosroms.com/fajita/#temporarily-booting-a-custom-recovery-using-fastboot) and found that on booting in, I just got start screen with options to 'start', 'restart bootloader', 'recovery mode' and 'power off'. I think it should have booted into some sort of UI instead when booting in in recovery mode (volume down + power).

The thing is, having reviewed the tutorial and compared it with others, I think one of the steps in the tutorial may have been wrong. It's step 5 of the Temporarily booting a custom recovery using fastboot section which reads:

"Temporarily flash a recovery on your device by typing:
fastboot flash boot <recovery_filename>.img"​

In other tutorials for similar devices this reads:

"Flash recovery onto your device:
fastboot flash recovery <recovery_filename>.img"​

Given that it appears the structure of the fastboot flash command is:

fastboot flash <partition> <file>​

can anyone confirm whether the instruction ought to have been written with 'recovery' not 'boot', so as to flash the recovery image to the recovery partition, not the boot one?

And supposing that is so, does anyone have any ideas about how I ought to proceed if the recovery image shouldn't have been written to the /boot partition but has been? Any chance I can just write the recovery image to the recovery partition and proceed as per the rest of the guide?

To complicate matters I also ran adb sideload copy-partitions-20200903_1329.zip as specified later in the instructions, which I believe is intended to copy content from slot a to slot b. From the shell error though, I think it failed to run and therefore I imagine has had no impact.

I'm attaching:

• an image of the line in the guidance
• an image of the screen I currently see on booting into 'recovery' mode,
• a text file with the commands run so far.

Many thanks in advance for any help offered.

 

Thanks @Brian706 ! I've found that the guide in question was based on a github page and I've sent a message to some of the maintainers (as the page itself doesn't allow non collaborators to create new issues or comment either). Meanwhile, I don't suppose you'd care to venture an opinion as to whether just running fastboot boot filename.img and proceeding with the guide would be likely to work, or whether I've got some extra work to do now that I've run fastboot flash boot filename.img before I can proceed with the guide? Generally I'd just try but as I know hard bricking is possible, it makes sense to stop digging . That said I'm just canvassing an opinion - I don't expect you to take responsibility of course!

 

Just a follow up - the maintainers of the official wiki got back to me and have said that the command in question is correct (i.e. it should be fastboot flash boot <recovery_filename>.img).

They also pointed out that https://lineageosroms.com/fajita/ is largely a repost from the official wiki and I they recommend using the official page (wiki.lineageos.org) instead - I definitely prefer to do so. FWIW, I have checked the links and also the sha256 sums of the recovery and ROMs I downloaded via the links on lineageosroms.com with the one's from wiki.lineageos.org - and at least the ones that I checked for fajita were the same - and the instructions they've copied do appear to be faithfully reproduced (currently) - but again, I'd suggest going to the page they've copied from instead.

Regarding my problem, I'm still at an utter loss as to why I'm seeing what I see. Any ideas? I guess I'll try to flash the stock ROM again and start over but I've no reason to suppose I won't see the exact same behaviour as I've no idea whatever where it's gone wrong, or how to reasonably set about diagnosing that.

As I've not done too well with getting the right sources so far anyone care to recommend a good set of instructions to recover the stock ROM from a soft brick?

 

Many, many thanks @Brian706 , - I really do appreciate that.

BTW since my last post I downloaded the previous recovery - that is the one from the 2021-12-23 just in case I got lucky and it was an issue with the latest. No dice but I can confirm that having run fastboot flash boot <filename>.img, I've got the behaviour back that I initially got after flashing the last time. That is, I get the infamous 'The boot loader is unlocked and software integrity cannot be guaranteed ...etc' when powering on with just the volume key down (as per step 6) - and the 'start' menu in 'fastboot' mode (which I posted an image of in my original post above) when I power on with both volume up and volume down. Don't know if this is relevant. The device is only discoverable to the host (a mac) when in fastboot mode. The 'bootloader is unlocked....etc' message ends with 'PRESS POWER KEY TO PAUSE BOOT' but no amount of waiting results in it booting any further. BTW one little thing I found confusing is where on step 5 it tells you 'fastboot flash boot <recovery_filename>.img' and step 6 begins with 'With the device powered off....' - step 5 didn't power the device off for me, so I assumed they meant that one should power the device off first and power it on again in the way they describe, which I did. However, I don't know, perhaps step 5 didn't run properly and it should have resulted in a power down.

The output of step 5 on the host is:

fastboot flash boot lineage-18.1-20211223-recovery-fajita.img
Sending 'boot_a' (65536 KB) OKAY [ 1.533s]
Writing 'boot_a' OKAY [ 0.318s]
Finished. Total time: 1.955s

Sorry if that's all noise and not significant, just trying to provide any little details I thought might help. Do let me know if there's any other details that you or anyone else on here might find indicative.

 

@Brian706 regarding 1) I did download the recovery file and 'flash' it using the command they specify in step 5 (the one I was questioning above). If I select the 'recovery mode' option, it just boots to the integrity screen as shown below:


Would this qualify as a boot loop? Also, I don't know if the recovery mode is a UI and like you I did wonder if the sideloading step could be performed from 'fastboot' mode, but as you say the instructions re side loading feel unclear. The impression I get though is that it ought to be a UI (I'm guessing perhaps like some 'safe modes' with reduced functionality on certain linux OSes) and that I ought to have the option to choose “Apply Update”. The fact that they don't give any indication where makes me think it ought to be fairly obvious, and in any case the options I have are so limited on fastboot that I reckon it can't be hiding there. Re the instructions, they're based on a templates which pull in particular instructions for certain devices but have some common parts, it seems, so that's about right.

Re

No just the output above:
fastboot flash boot lineage-18.1-20211223-recovery-fajita.img
Sending 'boot_a' (65536 KB) OKAY [ 1.533s]
Writing 'boot_a' OKAY [ 0.318s]
Finished. Total time: 1.955s

Not sure if there should have been more output though.

Yeah clocked that. But it does seem tohave written to boot_a as per the output just pasted. As for doing it to b, it would appear that is what the next stage sideloading is about..?

Re the stock recovery, I'm guessing that's gone as I just get the same integrity message when choosing recovery, as per above....

 

@Brian706 BTW I just tried running the manual option - gave the same result I'm afraid:

fastboot flash boot_a lineage-18.1-20211223-recovery-fajita.img
Sending 'boot_a' (65536 KB) OKAY [ 1.533s]
Writing 'boot_a' OKAY [ 0.318s]
Finished. Total time: 1.954s

If you reckon I don't mind trying doing it to slot b - the only thing is - if I could equally run it on slot b, what's the next section about with that particular zip for copying? I guess 'slot b' must be something different then? It would be pretty odd if I could run it on boot_a but need a script to copy to b, so that more or less answers my q... and it's true that it would explain a lot if the phone were configured to boot recovery from boot_b... worth trying it then I guess?

 

PS I think this is what I ought to be seeing: https://external-content.duckduckgo....alwakir.net/s/lineagerecovery.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

 

The plot thickens... before when selecting recovery (after booting into fastboot mode) I had just pushed the power button and let go. Then, as you say, waited for it to boot (I thought it might eventually boot owing to the message but it never did). Just now, I thought I'd try the opposite. I selected recovery mode with the power button but held it down a little while. That seems to have resulted in it rebooting and it loads the 1+ symbol in the middle of the screen but nothing else...

It's been like this at least 3 mins now... perhaps I'll just switch it off again (volume up + power button)

 

Unfortunately I don't see it :/. But that's what I should see I think.

 

I ran
> fastboot getvar all
and among all the output were these lines:

(bootloader) current-slot:a
(bootloader) has-slot:boot:yes
(bootloader) slot-retry-count:b:0
(bootloader) slot-unbootable:b:no
(bootloader) slot-successful:b:no
(bootloader) slot-retry-count:a:5
(bootloader) slot-unbootable:a:no
(bootloader) slot-successful:a:no
(bootloader) slot-count:2

That makes me think my 'recovery' slot will be slot b. Dunno if that has anything to do with boot_b. I'm a bit concerned about flashing the recovery to boot_b and finding it's now hard bricked... In your opinion is that very likely? I appreciate you're not responsible but what do you reckon?

 

@Brian706 perhaps I should clarify I mean that I used the up/down keys to select recovery mode then just pressed the power key once, which restarted the device and I saw the same screen. When I did the same just now and held down the power key a bit longer it just showed the 1+ icon for several minutes (and 'powered by android' at the bottom), so I reckon when I hold down power it does indeed pause the boot and that is what is shows me.

 

Sorry I should say I see the 'integrity' screen, not the fastboot screen when I pressed once to select recovery.

 

@Brian706 I 'flashed' the recovery image to boot_b. Output as per boot_a but with boot_b. Behaviour exactly the same. Anti-climax .

Lol this feels pretty ridiculous. Because there is such a vast gap between what goes on in these phones and what your average 'flasher' like myself (and a starter at that) knows, it's seems I'm doing just pretty random trial and error stuff, with the threat of 'hard bricking' hovering . There seems to be little to no info about how to really diagnose, on most forums I see 'try these commands' type stuff as opposed to serious diagnostics. And a lot of them seem to be in short hand at that to a novice like me.

When I read the guide on lineageos I thought, these seem pretty straightforward, if I do them exactly, all will probably work. Well I'm pretty sure I did them exactly and here I am The only thing I wrote or did that wasn't in the guide was a command that seemed to fail (I included it in the txt file) and I'm pretty sure it was a no-op. It's about the only thing I can think of that I might do differently if I were to follow the guide again.

I guess this is why people use 3rd party software like TWRP. That's probably a better bet right?

Anyway, for now, what do you reckon? Stock ROM time? That'll have to be another day. Something I've noticed about instructions for installing a stock ROM is that they often seem to assume a window environment - I don't suppose you'd recommend one in particular for a mac?

BTW let me say once more how much I appreciate you taking the time to help - it's a real kindness. I know it must be even more puzzling without the phone and getting everything by report too.

 

Yes, I should have thought of the firmware. I had just unboxed it and set it up with basically minimum details and didn't fancy even connecting it to the net before flashing another ROM, but who knows how long it had been in that box. If I had done, possibly the firmware would have updated and I wouldn't be having these issues. An alternative then, might even be to have tried a much older lineageos to start with, say 17 or even 16 or something. I may try that quickly in case it helps. If not I'll have to eventually flash back the stock ROM and maybe try another route from there. Once again thanks for all your help and support to date!

 

@Brian706 finally got around to picking this up again. Spoiler is that I ended up flashing the stock oxygen ROM again. Not done much testing but so far seems to be behaving fully. I thought I'd let you know as you took so much trouble the other day.

That said, I'm going to regroup and go looking for trouble again as I literally bought the phone to investigate alternatives to stock ROMs. This time I guess I'll try using TWRP as I've seen many people say that often works where the 'official' recovery images fail.

FWIW, I did try to flash twrp from where we left off but I just got some message about FAILED (remote: Failed to load/authenticate boot image: Load Error). Few other people had the issue but there wasn't much info about how to fix, especially for the 6T specifically. I was trying from those instructions rather than the ones on the official TWRP page for the 6T because that official page suggested it couldn't be done with the official TWRP unless TWRP was already on the phone or you had a special cable. I was hoping the unofficial version (by the same maintainer as the official one!) would do it but no luck.

So I found this post about installing the stock ROM by the same, guy (mauronofrio) - seems a sort of android super hero. It worked (though I left a couple of notes toward the bottom of the post as I found some minor roadblocks in using).

Will drop another note if I finally get lineageOS or other working via TWRP recovery and I'll install TWRP before beginning.