Develop Bugs

[Q] Strange backup/restore and update behaviour...

I just received my replacement Desire under insurance yesterday so started the process of making it "mine" properly...
The software version is 2.29.405.5 which I think is the latest. I was able to boot up to desktop and make calls with both Orange and Vodafone SIM cards so the phone is unlocked.
I did the following:
1 Downloaded the latest version of Unrevoked and rooted the phone with Clockworkmod Recovery version 2.5.0.7
2 Performed a nandroid backup (just in case ) using the new SD card that came with the phone.
3 Rebooted the phone.
After rebooting, the phone went into a closed loop around the HTC Quietly Brilliant logo and would not boot up properly. The only way out of the loop was to restore the backup I had just made.
I put my 16Gb card with an Ext3 partition on it, configured the phone, and tried to update it with a Modaco rom which includes A2SD+ (again after another nandroid backup).
Everything seemed to install properly, but again on bootup it went into a closed loop, this time around the Modaco logo. Again I was able to restore the backup I had just made!
I have absolutely no idea what the issue is and would appreciate any input.

Wipe all data and partitions?

I have done a factory reset - under clockwork recovery, which partitions to I need to format?

/system, /data, /cache and Dalvik cache. Just be warned that it will erase all data from your phone so please do a backup first. Then just flash the rom.

Success!
Many thanks for your help...
The only thing I forgot to back up was my SMS messages - oh well, no real loss

Phone completely toasted..??

I was running MIUI 1.9.2..hadnt updated in a few weeks.
Randomly today, I stated getting a crazy amount of force closes.. (framework, google voice, browser, messaging, etc.)
Went to go restart the phone and got stuck in bootloops.. Pulled the battery and tried it again, same thing.
Than I tried to boot into CWM recovery...noo good..stuck on splash screen. No idea what the problem is or how to go about fixing it.
Any ideas?
Thanks guys

If you can get into fast boot, but not recovery, try flashing the recovery from fast boot, or running an RUU to get back to stock, then reroot, but that means losing all your data. Try just recovery first.
Edit: I'm a firm believer of it's not bricked till it doesn't power on.

Yeah that sounds like a good idea. How exactly should I go about flashing recovery?..Via adb or can I put it in the root of the sd and flash it in fastboot

SD card must be fat 32. Put the recovery zip in the root of your sd card. Should be a file named PB31IMG.zip dougpiston.com (I think) is the site that has most of them, and you flash it from fast boot.

Oh yeah I remember him, hes over on the incredibleforum. Thank man, appreciate it

Got recovery working, tried re-flashing the ROM without a full wipe. Still stuck with bootloops. Is my only option to do a full wipe and lose everything?

Try wiping cache, dalvik, and boot, reflash ROM, then fix permissions. That doesn't work, do the above steps again, but right after, flash another kernel (I use incredikernel). If that still doesn't work, you might have to do a full wipe.

Yeah, I tried all that, no luck. Thanks anyway man. I don't even know why this happened in the first place. Very random.

Try reformatting you SD card. Save everything to your PC first of course, then copy everything back on and then reflash your Rom. This has worked for some.

[Q] How can i reset my HTC Desire?

Hello everyone,
first of all, im kind of new to rooting phones and stuff, what surely brought me to that problem i have.
I have an old HTC desire where i wanted to install a custom rom.
So i searched for a tutorial, i rooted the phone using unrevoked 3.21, worked fine. Then i wanted to install the custom rom, installed a backup tool first (something like "ClockwordMod Recovery") and made a backup on the sd card.
Then i wanted to install the custom ROM from this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1403113
Worked mostly fine, but when i wanted to start my phone i got stuck in the startup screen forever.
I searched for this issue and found some tips about clearing caches and clearing the sdcard, what i did - so here is the problem. The sdcard wipe propably killed my backup file and now i am pretty screwed, i still get stuck in the loading screen of the ROM, so i dont have access of the phone, and backup tool has no file to recover from.
So what to do now? I want to reset the phone to the rooted status and try to install the ROM again, but as i said i cant access to anything. Any suggestions?
Thanks
EDIT:
Allright, i have no idea why, but suddenly the phone starts up with the new OS. So this thread can be closed / deleted. Sorry for that

Checked bortak's troubleshooting guide??
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1275632

Sounds like you're sorted, can happen sometimes if it was your first CWM (nandroid) backup

SD causing Bootloop? (Unrooted/Stock Phone)

First off I want to say that I tried searching for this issue and what I found didn't seem to be exactly what was happening to me, if anyone knows of a thread about this please send me there so we don't bog the forum down with preexisting information .
T-Mo Samsung Galaxy S3 - (SGH-T999)
* Not Rooted
* No Custom ROM
I'll cut to the chase here. Phone started boot looping after restarting it this morning. Tried wiping the cache, didn't help. Tried pulling battery and waiting 5 min, didn't help. Removed the SIM card and pulled bat again, didn't help. Put SIM back in and removed SD card and pulled bat again, worked this time. I retried all the combinations again two more times each and got the same results so I am fairly confident the SD card or something on it is causing the issue. I tried a spare SD I had laying around and it gives me the same issue even after reformatting it. So now I'm wondering if something is wrong with the OS when it tries to mount/read the SD card. Anybody have this issue before or have any ideas? Any help is much appreciated!
P.S. I'm trying to avoid a factory reset if I can, but if I must, then I will do it.

Cant say ive seen this one before. But if you want to avoid the factory reset, try reflashing your current firmware build with Odin. Maybe try a slightly newer one as well.
You could also try flashing a custom recovery. Then try just wiping cache and dalvik. If needed, then try a factory reset. With a custom recovery installed it will not wipe your internal sd.
If none of this helps, use recovery to try and get important data off, then reflash stock firmware and factory reset again. Doing so with stock recovery actually formats the partition and will wipe internal sdcard. But it is the only way to completely clean everything up for more troubleshooting.

[Solved] Issues activating SGS3 SPH-L710 on Sprint with Custom ROM + lots of problems

Hello all!
This is my first foray into the world of custom Android systems, and I'm having a hell of a time with it... if somebody would be able to help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.
First off, the situation:
I am on Sprint, and I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy S3 (SPH-L710) from Sprint to use as a backup phone, I used it for a while on Stock, then deactivated it so I could give it to my wife. First though, I wanted to put a custom ROM on it, and experiment/play around a bit and see what this world of options could do for me. Long story short, I ended up flashing an AICP ROM, and everything seemed to go smoothly, but when I went to activate the phone on my account again and it would not work no matter what I tried (details below). I figured maybe I could activate on the stock setup then just restore my custom setup, so I tried to revert to my stock ROM backup and I couldn't do anything because I was constantly getting messages that various programs had closed... Then I tried to wipe and restore my custom ROM backup and I get stuck in a boot loop... so I tried to flash a stock recovery and I get stuck in a boot loop... I'm out of ideas here, and now I'm stuck with a phone I can't use or do anything with, and I can't activate.
Details:
The initial rooting/install process seemed to work ok, and was fairly straightforward. I followed various guides on http://galaxys3root.com/ to get my phone rooted and backed up (Don't recall which ones now, but I've read through so much by now I don't know if it matters...).
My phone:
Samsung Galaxy S3 (Sprint) SPH-L710
Modem: L710SPRDNJ2
My Desktop:
Debian Linux
Here's the steps I performed:
Rebooted phone in Odin mode
Downloaded CWM S3 Sprint Recovery from the http://galaxys3root.com/ website (can't find the link any more)
Flashed the CWM recovery using Heimdall then rebooted phone into CWM
Installed SuperSU through CWM, then rebooted
Checked that the phone was rooted successfully (it was), then ran Titanium Backup on the whole device to my SD card, then copied the backup files to my desktop computer
Rebooted into CWM, and performed a backup through CWM, then rebooted and copied the CWM backup to my desktop.
Downloaded AICP Rom for my phone from here: http://downloadandroidrom.com/file/GalaxyS3Sprint/roms/AICP/aicp_d2spr_lp-10.0-RELEASE-20150707.zip, put it on my SD card, then installed it through CWM and rebooted
At this point, I was happy with how everything was working, so I did some minor theme customizations then made another backup through CWM, and copied it to my computer, but I did NOT run Titanium this time...
After all of this, I tried to go ahead and activate it through the Sprint web service. This process failed continuously with an unhelpful error message of "Sorry, this device can't be activated right now". I then got on Chat to see if they could activate it manually, and then the problems began. They did their thing activating the phone, but when I booted up I got no data connectivity, and couldn't make calls, and the SIM was not changing over to the new number. I was on the chat with them for over an hour trying to get the situation resolved, but that finally ended when they started asking me to punch in ## codes, because I discovered that none of them worked on my custom ROM. Some quick research told me that this was non-trivial to get around so I had them switch everything back and I started researching the issue.
I found this thread: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1626638&highlight=sph-l710 that looked like it would let me do what I needed from the custom ROM, but I couldn't tell if it would fix my problem for sure, so I figured "I'll just restore my stock setup from that backup I took, activate it and update, then start over". This is when things got really frustrating...
First I rebooted into CWM, went to 'backup/restore', and restored my stock backup
Rebooted, and as soon as I got past the lock screen, I get inundated with messages of various apps being closed unexpectedly.
I researched a bit, discovered the issue may be caused by stale dalvik cache, so I rebooted into CWM, cleared the dalvik cache, formatted the /cache partition, then tried to restore the stock backup again, but this time I get stuck in a boot loop.
I then rebooted into CWM, tried to restore the backup of my AICP ROM, only to be stuck in a boot loop as well.
Trying to get into any usable system, I rebooted to CWM, cleared dalvik cache, then formatted /cache, /data, and /system just to be sure, and re-flashed the base AICP ROM I started with. This worked fine, and before long I had stock AICP back
Since I still couldn't get the phone to activate in the custom ROM, and my backups are apparently completely useless, I rebooted into CWM, wiped dalvik, /cache, /data, and /system again and tried to install a different stock ROM I found in the XDA forums (here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s3-sprint/development/stock-rom-4-4-2-t3010642) only to be greeted by another bootloop
At this point I've spent well over 24 man-hours trying to get this to work, reading, researching, flashing, etc all to no avail. Nothing I do seems to work, and it seems like every article, tutorial, or forum thread I read either has nothing to do with my device, is too old, or doesn't describe my problem.
I'm at wits end, and am so frustrated I'm ready to just give up and smash this device and buy a new one... My questions to the community are as follows:
I know I screwed up on a couple of things, but in my initial research of doing this there was no indication that these were even things I needed to watch out for... Is there any more organized sources of information for doing this sort of thing?
Does anybody else out there use Sprint on a custom ROM, and if so how you you pull this off
Where else have I screwed up, and how can I fix this situation? (My end goal is still to get the S3 onto Sprint with a custom ROM)
What can I do differently next time? I would like to figure this out and do it to other phones and devices I have, but if it's this much trouble every time, I just don't have the time to mess with it.
Thank you in advance, and I appreciate any information that the community can provide.

This sounds like a CWM problem to me. If I were you, I'd boot the phone into Odin Mode and flash TWRP ( www.twrp.me ) then try flashing the latest aicp nightly downloaded from the official site ( www.aicp-rom.com ). Check the md5sums on everything! Then maybe try flashing a touchwiz ROM and activating your phone. Remember that you need to wipe the internal storage when you go between KitKat and lollipop.

I'm fairly certain you have to do activation with the stock Touchwiz roms -- once the phone is activated you can flash a custom.
You should go into recovery and wipe everything (System/data/etc) EXCEPT for the External SD Card
Power off - pull the battery for a few - power on directly into download mode
Odin NJ2 back onto the phone and reboot and activate it (skip through most of the setup since you'll flash a custom after)
Once you know it's activated and working under the stock Touchwiz, then again power off and Odin TWRP recovery
Then you can go back into recovery, wipe everything except External SD, and flash the custom rom back on.

Looks like swapping CWM for TWRP did the trick.
Flashed TWRP no problems, and put CleanBean on there to get the phone activated. Still wouldn't work automatically over the Sprint website, but I got on chat with them and they fixed me right up. Downloading a fresh copy of AICP now...
Is it worth it to keep the CWM backups I made earlier, or should I just go ahead and flush them? I figured just get rid of them since restoring them wasn't working anyway, but I figured I would ask.
Now to move all the data over to the new phone. Thanks so much for your help guys!

afarris01 said:
Looks like swapping CWM for TWRP did the trick.
Flashed TWRP no problems, and put CleanBean on there to get the phone activated. Still wouldn't work automatically over the Sprint website, but I got on chat with them and they fixed me right up. Downloading a fresh copy of AICP now...
Is it worth it to keep the CWM backups I made earlier, or should I just go ahead and flush them? I figured just get rid of them since restoring them wasn't working anyway, but I figured I would ask.
Now to move all the data over to the new phone. Thanks so much for your help guys!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Get rid of them. TWRP can't restore CWM even if the backup is good