Boot from SD card *ONLY* (all partitions) ? - G3 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hi,
My LG G3 d855 has fried, the flash chip looks dead (unable to flash new system partition, when I try the dmesg from the recovery kernel shows error from the flash chip).
So now I'd like to know if it's possible to install everything on the SD card and boot from there. I already made a copy of all the partitions (I can still read from the flash), the /system partition is unusable but all the other ones look good.
Has anyone tried that ? Or does anyone have an idea where I could stick some boot arguments to make it work ?

Related

Possible root cause of 'bricking' desire when flashing new rom

Hi,
New to the forum - since I've used so many of the threads to gather new ROMs and sort out problems on my desire, I've decided to share what I've learned. Don't know if this is old news but it's new for me.
Have a rooted Desire and have installed a few different ROMs (opendesire, leedroid, pinkolin's one etc.). Like others, I recently partitioned my SDCARD with one FAT32 and one ext3/4 partition (and a small swap partition) to allow storage of more apps without impacting phone mem too much. Don't ask about swap - old 'nix habits. This worked fine until I tried to install a new ROM recently (went through the Recovery/ClockworkMod method, not ROM Manager).
Thought I had bricked the phone as it booted but got stuck on the loading screen.
Tried wiping all caches/data. No change.
Tried to reflash old ROM and Radio - no luck. ROM installed but same problem.
Tried RUU (including PB99IMG.zip) - no luck. Got CID error.
Noticed that in ClockworkMod, when I tried to mount /sd-ext/ the phone didn't like it - couldn't find the device.
Put SDCARD into a reader and deleted the ext3/4 and swap partitions, then installed the ROM from the FAT32 partition. Phone booted no problem.
Have a hypothesis that, with ext partition present, when ROM is installed, it takes this into account and links the ext partition as a device which then tries to mount as /sd-ext/ which it can't do as it doesn't understand the filesystem until finished booting. Can't mount /sd-ext/ until full boot, can't boot unless /sd-ext/ mounted. Therefore, no booting properly.
With no ext partition present, has to create /sd-ext/ itself and then mounts it which allows full boot into Android.
Would suggest that anyone flashing a new ROM who has an ext partition present either hides or deletes the partition (after backing up apps) to ensure that android doesn't get confused.

Desire stuck in boot loop

Hello, tonight i tried some thing (i just wanted to change rom), but i made some mistakes... now i cannot boot my phone, it keeps rebooting. I have Leedroid ROM and it keeps rebooting after PC-boot like animation. The only thing i can access is the back button + power recovery. What can i do?
Thanks!
I have tried to wipe the cache and system, and solo deleted storage (hard reset)... but same point. I think that if i can put a update.zip on the sdcard i can flash it... but at the moment i don't have a sd card reader. Is the phone dead?
No your phone isnt dead
1. If you have a nandroid on your sd card just enter hboot and recover your system.
2. Otherwise you can perform an md5 check of the rom you downloaded and wish to flash. (just to make sure its not corrupted, i suppose your trying to flash leedroid) Enter hboot wipe everything >system wipe>cache>dalvic and then relash the rom. Oh and make sure your sd card is partitioned correctly ... a2sd, D2EXt ...
3. If problem persists go into hboot mount your phone as storage copy another rom you would like to try and then flash this, you can just follow the steps in no2 abouve again.
This should solve your problem!
The thing that i have done BAD is the format of the card... or better, i have done right things but i'm almost sure something was wrong. I formatted it from gparted, then created a 3GB FAT32 partition, and with the remaining space i created a ext4 partition. Then, i moved the files needed for the rom that i wanted to flash (MIUI) in the fat32 partition, as i seen that the ext4 part was mounted read only (dunno why).
IMPORTANT: I have done all this mounting the SD card via Clockwork recovery.
When i selected the voice "flash a zip selecting from memory card" (or something )... it said "cannot find a valid zip".
Then the only choice for me was to reboot and... that is
Now i cannot mount SD, as i don't have (at home) a SD card reader and i don't have access to CWM recovery.

[HELP!!?!!?] SD Card and Recovery Problems

Here's a lovely and vague one for you all to try wrap your heads around...
Okay, so I started having trouble with my SD card about a year ago after my mate added a partition so I could flash A2SD ROMs (I believe - I was stuck and asked him to sort it and from what I can gather, that's what he did). It was fine for a while, then suddenly it became nigh on unresponsive to Android: I couldn't take photos, install apps to SD, basically any data transfer between the device and the SD storage was not happening. I think this was after I tried to delete some things to make room for videos and **** but I was stuck on about 300MB of the ~2GB available (this may have been my first attempt to delete after the partition, I'm not sure).
That was the birth of a problem I am still yet to fix. My dad needed a new phone and I wasn't using my Desire anymore. He's 53, and so the Sense UI was less than intuitive to him which lead to me offering to make it a bit simpler for him (flash a stock ROM and use a more information-centric launcher). The device badly needed updating anyways as I hadn't done so since my mate partitioned my SD card and some bugs had began to develop on the ROM I was using. So, I downloaded the latest CM build and set about reformatting the storage to see if I could solve some of the issues. In attempting to do so I think I performed a data, cache and dalvik cache wipe which removed the ROM I was currently using. The partitioning was successful, so I transferred the new ROM and attempted to flash - BOOM! Error message. Tried again, same thing. Now I have a phone that'll only boot into a recovery that's 5 full versions old (CM Recovery v2.5.0.7) without a way to flash an update img. I've tried on many different occasions to try and sort the problem and spent relentless hours trying to research a solution to the numerous different error messages this produces. Every error I can remember was a problem with read/write on the SD card, so I purchased a new one to no avail.
The phone CAN'T be bricked, surely. I still have access to things like USB mounting (which works absolutely fine), and most importantly, access to the recovery. Please don't tell me she won't live on, this is my baby and she's going down fighting! :'(
TL;DR SD card read/write issues. I only have access to recovery. I can mount the SD card via USB in CM Recovery, but every time I try to flash a new ROM I get numerous different read/write errors.
Go here:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1408936
There you can download 4ext recovery that can be flashed via fastboot or using some flasher.
When you flash it repartition your sd card, choose only one sd-ext partition (not bigger than 1,5gb), no swap and fat32 for thevrest of your card.
After repartitioning try to flash some rom and see how it will work.

LG G3 Bootloop

Hello, I have problem with G3 D855 32GB model, I have tried Lg flash tool, LGUP, nothing helps, tried few stock roms, always in boot loop.
When I had somehow managed to install stock android, I have installed root and twrp and when I tried to install custom android (fulmics or any else) i got error about unable to mount /system or /data or /cache.
Is there any chance that internal storage is bad or any way to try to fix it?
New update, so I managed to install stock rom with help of boarddiag, eMMC test pass, flashed stock rom, working good for day or so and then again I have same problem, bootloops, freezing, internal storage shown as 0MB in TWRP, with custom ROM, same problems. What could be damaged? Internal storage? RAM, SoC? I would like to rebuild all partitions from the scratch, because with boarddiag tutorial system, cache and data are not changed or anything. Any info how I could erase all partitions and rebuild them, maybe with boarddiag? That is my last option.

Revived i9195 has 0 MB in TWRP internal Storage after Hard Brick

Hi community,
I suddenly experienced a hard bricked I9195 and managed to revive it with debrick.img and a USB JIG (burn debrick.img on SD Card, insert USB JIG, put battery back in and press Power Button).
I've flashed a new Bootloader with Odin3 and now my Phone boots again, but is unable to load Android (stuck on Boot Animation). I can launch TWRP and there I'm able to see the issues:
The internal storage is displayed with 0 MB space. This comes from broken partitions that cannot be mounted (mount reports "Invalid Arument").
I'm not able to reformat, wipe or fix them with TWRP.
Using fdisk, I found out, that my Internal Flash has a size of 3348 MB instead of 8 GB . Several partitions are defined and they exceed the 3348 MB.
I've tried to update TWRP to 3.2.1-1 with Odin, but even after passed flashing, it does not have any effect. I've also tried to go back to stock and added a pit file, but after the flashing is reported successfully and I reboot the phone, nothing has changed.
How can I fix the storage? TWRP is useless and cannot fix the partitions. Using fdisk for repartitioning would be crazy and the size is reported wrong.
Any ideas?
-----
Additional findings:
It seems, that i can flash and do what I want. The flash storage discards any changes.
I've tried to flash another recovery. Nothing after reboot.
I've tried to write a file /system/testing. Not there after a reboot.
It seems that the flash is broken and the device assumes the write is okay.
I just encountered exactly the same problem on my S4 mini. Have you found any solution?
Regards
RR

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