douginoz
28th July 2009, 09:10 PM
I read over and over again the same sort of advice given to people that flash their phones and have problems - hard reset the phone immediately after flashing, then do lots of soft resets to clear up problems.
Ok, that makes sense, but what doesn't make sense is that some people are told to hard reset their phone twice, or multiple times. This doesn't make sense.
There seems to be a growing belief, most likely perpetuated by non-technically minded users, that multiple hard resets will somehow effect a different outcome.
Can someone enlighten me on how a phone's memory, split between RAM and ROM, is somehow different than normal computer memory?
A hard reset will reset all writable memory and the CPU.
A soft reset will clear some cpu registers and some writable memory.
Once a hard reset is done, doing another one immediately afterwards can't really make a difference, can it?
If you disagree, please tell me in technical terms. I have 20+ years in CPU architectures in mainframes and don't understand this strange "variable" outcome.
Another, even more bizarre thing is this idea of a "bad flash" - that if your phone, after flashing, has idiosyncrasies, that doing another flash will solve it. By "idiosyncrasies", I mean that certain applications and features don't work well.
This seems to imply that flashing is an imperfect act - that >some< memory may not get written correctly. It's almost like the phone has putty for memory and the act of flashing is an imperfect art of trying to "impress" the phone with a new image, and sometimes you don't get a good imprint.
Are there no checksums? Does a phone actually run if some parts of memory are corrupt? I don't think so.
I think that if a flash doesn't work and some memory is corrupted, then the phone will freeze or spontaneously reboot. It's not going to operate 99.99% normally and have one application or function work slightly differently than everyone else's. Again, explain in technical terms how this can happen.
I'm pretty sure that a successful flash is pretty much a 100% guarantee that all memory has been copied to the phone exactly the same for all users with the same model of phone+radio. I don't think flashing a 2nd time does anything different. What I think happens is that the user tries a different set of actions after flashing the 2nd time, and possibly avoids creating the same problems experienced originally.
I also think that people are using the "If you have a problem, reflash or hard reset it several times" advice in the same way we tell non-geeks "reset your PC", ie. as a first step to troubleshooting. But it's developing an unspoken idea among many users that phones have what I'll call "putty memory" and that reflashing and hard reseting multiple times will effect the outcome.
Ok, that makes sense, but what doesn't make sense is that some people are told to hard reset their phone twice, or multiple times. This doesn't make sense.
There seems to be a growing belief, most likely perpetuated by non-technically minded users, that multiple hard resets will somehow effect a different outcome.
Can someone enlighten me on how a phone's memory, split between RAM and ROM, is somehow different than normal computer memory?
A hard reset will reset all writable memory and the CPU.
A soft reset will clear some cpu registers and some writable memory.
Once a hard reset is done, doing another one immediately afterwards can't really make a difference, can it?
If you disagree, please tell me in technical terms. I have 20+ years in CPU architectures in mainframes and don't understand this strange "variable" outcome.
Another, even more bizarre thing is this idea of a "bad flash" - that if your phone, after flashing, has idiosyncrasies, that doing another flash will solve it. By "idiosyncrasies", I mean that certain applications and features don't work well.
This seems to imply that flashing is an imperfect act - that >some< memory may not get written correctly. It's almost like the phone has putty for memory and the act of flashing is an imperfect art of trying to "impress" the phone with a new image, and sometimes you don't get a good imprint.
Are there no checksums? Does a phone actually run if some parts of memory are corrupt? I don't think so.
I think that if a flash doesn't work and some memory is corrupted, then the phone will freeze or spontaneously reboot. It's not going to operate 99.99% normally and have one application or function work slightly differently than everyone else's. Again, explain in technical terms how this can happen.
I'm pretty sure that a successful flash is pretty much a 100% guarantee that all memory has been copied to the phone exactly the same for all users with the same model of phone+radio. I don't think flashing a 2nd time does anything different. What I think happens is that the user tries a different set of actions after flashing the 2nd time, and possibly avoids creating the same problems experienced originally.
I also think that people are using the "If you have a problem, reflash or hard reset it several times" advice in the same way we tell non-geeks "reset your PC", ie. as a first step to troubleshooting. But it's developing an unspoken idea among many users that phones have what I'll call "putty memory" and that reflashing and hard reseting multiple times will effect the outcome.