This is a question for those in the know when it comes to programming.Why isn't there a way to revive a bricked phone? Can't there be some method for a host computer to manually write the radio to the device? How does HTC fix a bricked phone for it to be a refurb?
I'm just very curious about this because I see a few people attempt to update the radio only to lose power and brick their EVO. I have no programming experience so don't know what goes on at the internal component level. Thanks in advance for your input.
It goes back to the old bootstrapping problem when computers were being developed. A computer (in this case, your cell phone) is pretty dumb at the hardware level. All it can do is run programs. That's ALL it can do. It can't even load a program, only run them. Thus the problem. It gets solved by injecting a "bootstrap" program at startup (from the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps") which is a program that runs and gives access to all the I/O, and the computer can then load more programs.
When you update this bootstrapping program, it gets dicey, because if it isn't written right, or if there's a glitch during the update, this most basic of all functions gets corrupted. If the program that tells the phone how to load programs goes away, all the phone can do is... sit there. Like a brick.
Hope this helped!
That helped me, thanks.
Soylent Grin said:
It goes back to the old bootstrapping problem when computers were being developed. A computer (in this case, your cell phone) is pretty dumb at the hardware level. All it can do is run programs. That's ALL it can do. It can't even load a program, only run them. Thus the problem. It gets solved by injecting a "bootstrap" program at startup (from the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps") which is a program that runs and gives access to all the I/O, and the computer can then load more programs.
When you update this bootstrapping program, it gets dicey, because if it isn't written right, or if there's a glitch during the update, this most basic of all functions gets corrupted. If the program that tells the phone how to load programs goes away, all the phone can do is... sit there. Like a brick.
Hope this helped!
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Thanks for the info. That is interesting. So how does HTC initially put the bootstrap in and/or how do they handle a bricked phone?
Soylent Grin said:
It goes back to the old bootstrapping problem when computers were being developed. A computer (in this case, your cell phone) is pretty dumb at the hardware level. All it can do is run programs. That's ALL it can do. It can't even load a program, only run them. Thus the problem. It gets solved by injecting a "bootstrap" program at startup (from the phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps") which is a program that runs and gives access to all the I/O, and the computer can then load more programs.
When you update this bootstrapping program, it gets dicey, because if it isn't written right, or if there's a glitch during the update, this most basic of all functions gets corrupted. If the program that tells the phone how to load programs goes away, all the phone can do is... sit there. Like a brick.
Hope this helped!
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Click to collapse
Thanks good explanation appreciate that.
rafroehlich2 said:
Thanks for the info. That is interesting. So how does HTC initially put the bootstrap in and/or how do they handle a bricked phone?
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Click to collapse
There is probably a JTAG interface somewhere in there. In fact,that's how the original hack of the IPhone was done. (Better ways were since found) Most devices have a quasi standard interface for programming the flash and accessing and the hardware for diagnostics. For instance,linksys routers actually have a spot on the board to solder a header and you can make a cable that connects to the parralel port. Do a google search for "Hairy Dairy Maid Debrick" and you will find it. A similar thing is probobally possible with the Evo (Ive even seen them on Hard Drives and CD Rom drives) The problem is,its not entirely standardized,and it might not even be a connector or pads on the board. It might instead be a matter of knowing where you can connect the leads on the board to something that under the right circumstances BECOMES the JTAG connector. (For instance,a pin that controls something else might be a JTAG interface for the first few hundred milliseconds of start-up,or if a certain other pin of the chip is grounded when the power is applied. It might also be completely internal to the chip,and there be NO connectors on the board (it almost CERTAINLY has the capability,they need it during prototyping) and the chips might be programmed BEFORE they are soldered in. It might take replacing the rom chip to get it to go. There are lots of ifs
Chances are though,the factory has a special cable and a special software program that can reprogram the device. To replicate that might be relatively easy or could be next to impossible but requires a certain degree of knowledge about the hardware. What I suspect is,until someone who has the skills to make such a cable bricks their phone,they wont bother figuring out how to debrick one. In fact,when that person bricks their phone,they will probably take it back to sprint and say "I dont know what happens" In fact,even if its stuck looping in an obviously hacked boot loader he for some odd reason cant undo,hes probably going to send it back to sprint. I know someone who did exactly that to their brand new HP laptop. He found that 15kv from the flyback of an old B&W television applied to the memory slots took care of the looping and Best Buy gave him another one. As he put it "I dont know what happened,but it smells bad and wont boot up"
pflatlyne said:
There is probably a JTAG interface somewhere in there. In fact,that's how the original hack of the IPhone was done. (Better ways were since found) Most devices have a quasi standard interface for programming the flash and accessing and the hardware for diagnostics. For instance,linksys routers actually have a spot on the board to solder a header and you can make a cable that connects to the parralel port. Do a google search for "Hairy Dairy Maid Debrick" and you will find it. A similar thing is probobally possible with the Evo (Ive even seen them on Hard Drives and CD Rom drives) The problem is,its not entirely standardized,and it might not even be a connector or pads on the board. It might instead be a matter of knowing where you can connect the leads on the board to something that under the right circumstances BECOMES the JTAG connector. (For instance,a pin that controls something else might be a JTAG interface for the first few hundred milliseconds of start-up,or if a certain other pin of the chip is grounded when the power is applied. It might also be completely internal to the chip,and there be NO connectors on the board (it almost CERTAINLY has the capability,they need it during prototyping) and the chips might be programmed BEFORE they are soldered in. It might take replacing the rom chip to get it to go. There are lots of ifs
Chances are though,the factory has a special cable and a special software program that can reprogram the device. To replicate that might be relatively easy or could be next to impossible but requires a certain degree of knowledge about the hardware. What I suspect is,until someone who has the skills to make such a cable bricks their phone,they wont bother figuring out how to debrick one. In fact,when that person bricks their phone,they will probably take it back to sprint and say "I dont know what happens" In fact,even if its stuck looping in an obviously hacked boot loader he for some odd reason cant undo,hes probably going to send it back to sprint. I know someone who did exactly that to their brand new HP laptop. He found that 15kv from the flyback of an old B&W television applied to the memory slots took care of the looping and Best Buy gave him another one. As he put it "I dont know what happened,but it smells bad and wont boot up"
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Click to collapse
Wow. Thanks for the detailed answer. Too bad this isn't a standardized item. I hope eventually things progress enough where this isn't even a thought. Thanks again for the good response.
Sent from my PC36100
rafroehlich2 said:
Wow. Thanks for the detailed answer. Too bad this isn't a standardized item. I hope eventually things progress enough where this isn't even a thought. Thanks again for the good response.
Sent from my PC36100
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Click to collapse
Yea,it would be nice if it were. Its kinda sorta quasi standard,so it HAS been done in some cases where its necessary,but often there are easier ways around it. Personally, I have allways thought that its a pretty stupid thing to make a piece of equipment that can fail due to a bad flash. The people who designed many of the flash memory chips seemed to agree,and they added something called a "boot block" to many,but the way its implemented,when its implemented doesn't fully protect you from a bad flash. Its even worse now that everything is in ball grid array chips soldered down to the board.
I've seen this question around a lot but not a lot of the guides on how to solve it are particularly coherent (particularly for noobs like me) so basically here goes my issue:
I pulled the battery out of my phone when it froze the other day and it got stuck booting at the HTC splash screen. This has happened quite a few times before (CM7.1 seems to be particularly bad imo) but every other time, just doing a full wipe solved the problem. This time however, that didn't work. I get the messages about not being able to mount /cache/recovery/... I cannot flash new roms nor use backups (the ones in CWM). This has been noted a lot of times around XDA, especially with the Desire Z and S.
I have also checked which eMMC chip model I have and I apparently have the "dodgy" one (serial M4G2DE), which is quite partial to dying. I just need some way of knowing whether it's possible to recover my phone or whether it's gone the way of the dodo.
There seem to be a lot of guides about how to try to solve this on the Desire S but I don't know how applicable they are to the DZ (whether the hboot and images are the same or not), so what can I do?
I really want to try everything to get this working because I'm almost certain I can't return it (I bought it off ebay and it's rooted with S-OFF), and I can't really afford to splash out on a new phone.
If anyone needs more information, just shout and thanks!
the main thing is don't freak out, cause even in the worse case, all you have to do is send your phone and US$40 to that famous dude here in the XDA forum who un-bricks anything.
I wonder if we could use something like the evo 3d's way of getting 1.5 soff to recover our bricks. Anyone who hasn't seen it check out the sticky in the cdma evo 3d about soff on hboot 1.5. They are bricking an emmc device in order to flash and rewrite partitions. If we could do something similar with an ics brick that would be the holy grail for our device. Just a thought
Sent from my BAD A$$ EPIC TOUCH 4G
there seems to be at least 2 different bricks on the E4GT. one which still has a usb connection.. maybe even boots to recovery.. but wont flash anything. there is a chance one can recover from this by manually rewriting each partition. i've seen mention of some doing this.. but no solid proof. just saying i can't say this will def work.
brick #2 is the one where all you see is the blue led. nothing on screen.. no usb detection.. nothing. if there is no way to get a usb connection.. there is no way to save the phone.
i'm seeing two possibly fixes for this:
1. Jtag flashing. A Riff Box is needed for this.. as well as knowing the jtag points n all that jazz... afaik none of this is public info. mobiletechvideos, http://bit.ly/FQ5akq, has a jtag service on their site. i have been told this service was still unable to fix the recent ICS hard brix but i can not confirm first hand.
2. Find some pin to short out while the phones plugged in to force download mode or some kind of usb connection.
most ppl can easily exchange their bricked phone at a sprint store so im not sure how many people are seriously concerned. now if all of us we're unable to get a replacement... it'd be a different story.
don't wonder to hard.
we don't need it on this phone.
Hey guys,
Just signed up to ask a few questions, a very good friend of mine had her phone (T-mobile Samsung Galaxy SII SGH-T989) run over the other day. Needless to say she is not very tech savvy. She has a new S4 now. Now the problem is, that being she is not so tech savvy she didn't back up (ever?) So i am looking to somehow recover lost pictures and contacts if possible.
Now I have a small background in building computers and taking stuff apart so I agreed to take a look at the phone. The screen is shot. but besides that the other internals look fine. Nothing is broken as far as i can tell. When I plug the phone in with the battery nothing comes up at all, except when i leave it plugged in for a little bit the LED under the camera will flash about once every minute or so.
So i guess the question i have is did the motherboard somehow short circuit when it was run over? Has anyone had experience with a situation similar to this before?
And is there a way to get the phone on long enough to recover the lost info?
Help would be much appreciated if possible.
Justin
As phones don't have an actual hard drive, I doubt you can recover anything from a phone that isn't running.
Sent from my N5, N7, Moto X, G Tab 3 or S2.....
This is not easy, but can be done. I have done similar recoveries several times…
You’ll need:
1) The equipment & ability to remove a surface mount soldered chip, and re-solder it onto another board *without* damaging it.
2) Another identical phone to host the transplanted chip.
3) A service manual, or someone with intimate knowledge of the device, to identify the correct chip…
Note that if the pix were encrypted this will not work…
On a recent related thread I asked if there was any way to confirm if my tablet is in fact hard bricked. aside from me trying to find someone that knows enough about electronics and electricity to check the battery and power input/output using a Multimeter, the general idea is that it is in fact dead for random and unknown reasons T_T life sucks right now.
anyway, the question I want to pose here is: Assuming my tablet is in fact hard bricked, is there any way to ensure that all the data is wiped? If there is any sliver of a chance that I can salvage this to someone for a few bucks, I need to make sure the data cannot be retrieved. I feel that this is far too random to be a straight Hard Brick situation and think that Im just missing something. Im sure someone could bring it to life, but if they do, theres stuff on there that I cant let them have.
Any thoughts?