[TUT] Full U8800 backup with Linux howto

I hope this information is useful to you. It allowed me to restore my phone, after flashing the 2.3.5BETA from Huawei, effectively reverting the process. If you follow these procedures, you do so at your own risk. A typo in the needed commands may render your phone useless, so if you feel uneasy DON'T DO IT! That being said, on with the show.


Rationale: The U8800's memory is accessible as a mass storage device, when the phone is powered up in pink screen mode. This device holds the boot sector, partitions, operating system and user data. As such, it can be treated as any other block device and can be imaged to a file, through a bit-by-bit copy. The inverse is also possible and thus constitutes a valid backup/restore method.

Motives: Some weeks ago, I imaged my U8800 having in mind that spending time flashing ROMs, recovery and boot images could at some point go wrong and brick the device. Having a full dump of the device, done while it was in good working condition, would give me a chance of disaster recovery.

Requirements: Linux box and familiarization with Linux. I use Slackware 13.37 x86_64, but any flavour of Linux should do.


1 - Enter pink-screen mode by pressing power + vol up + vol down;

2 - Connect the USB cable. I recommend using the USB ports on the back of your PC (irrelevant if it's a laptop) as some PC cases have inadequate wiring to the front ports and will only allow slow data transfer. I've done it all while logged in as root, and not running X. If you're running X and HALD (automount of CD's and USB sticks, etc), you should unmount whatever units get automaticaly mounted when you plug the U8800 in. Avoid X if possible;

3 - Run 'dmesg' to ensure your U8800 was correctly detected. last output on screen should look like this:

[ 4444.026295] usb 1-2: New USB device found, idVendor=12d1, idProduct=1035
[ 4444.026300] usb 1-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[ 4444.026304] usb 1-2: Product: Qualcomm CDMA Technologies MSM
[ 4444.026308] usb 1-2: Manufacturer: Qualcomm, Incorporated
[ 4444.029209] usb 1-2: selecting invalid altsetting 1
[ 4444.029265] scsi4 : usb-storage 1-2:1.20
[ 4445.031474] scsi 4:0:0:0: Direct-Access Qualcomm MMC Storage 2.31 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[ 4445.031755] sd 4:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
[ 4445.034576] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] 7733248 512-byte logical blocks: (3.95 GB/3.68 GiB)
[ 4445.035947] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[ 4445.035952] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 0f 0e 00 00
[ 4445.035956] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 4445.042568] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 4445.053569] sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 sdb4 < sdb5 sdb6 sdb7 sdb8 sdb9 sdb10 sdb11 sdb12 sdb13 sdb14 >
[ 4445.059328] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 4445.059335] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk"

"sdb" is the device name alocated to the U8800. It can be "sdc", "sdd", "sde". Depends on the number of block devices (hard disks, USB sticks, card readers, etc) already present on your system.

4 - If your U8800 is showing up in "dmesg"' output, you are ready to create the image file, by typing "dd if=/dev/sdb of=u8800.img bs=512". Remeber: this example assumes the device name to be "sdb", yours may be different. If all goes well, you'll end up with the "u8800.img" file in the current directory. This is a 4GB transfer so it will take some time and there will be no progress indicator whatsoever. Final output should look like:

3959420000 bytes (3866621 KB) copied, [ time spent], [KB/s] ( These figures vary according to your transfer speed )

If the transfer fails, the output will show how many bytes were transfered along with the indication that there was an error; should it indicate an error, retry from the beginning, using a different USB port.

The resulting u8800.img file can be ziped, gziped, bziped, rared, whatever to reduce it's size to around 600 MB.

4A - This concludes the backup part;

5 - Having hold of the u8800.img file, you can restore it back to your U8800. Connecting and finding the device name of your mobile through the output of "dmesg" is the same as for backup and is described in (1), (2) and (3). To restore it, and assuming the img file resides in the current directory, type "dd if=u8800.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512". Don't forget to decompress the file in case you ziped it. Again, your device name may be other than "sdb".

Since writing to flash memory is a slower process than reading it, this operation will take longer than performing the backup. As an example, mine took around 45 minutes to complete, while other user reported 25 minutes for the same operation.

BEWARE: There's no way to perform a sanity check of the img file you're dumping back! Those commands will hapilly flash an Excel spreadsheet to your mobile's memory if you give it as a parameter to the "dd" command!


Final words

I used this method to revert to a pre 2.3.5BETA state. Huawei's update wrote a new bootloader, which is something not included in CWM backups and restores. Furthermore: CWM restores showed up errors about mountpoints. Ignoring these errors and performing a factory reset would allow FROYO to boot up and run, but my carrier's costumizations, which reside in the same volume as boot.img, and restore.img, were ignored afterwards. I didn't want this to be used as an argument by the carrier to consider my warranty void, should I need it...

Cheers

sewa2k said:

First of all, thanks for your tut, it's very helpfull for those who have linux

I have a question

The u8800.img contains all partition data?

Thanks in advance, regards

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Click to collapse

Yes. You can mount the image through /dev/loop and run fdisk on it to see the partition table.

There are windows tools to accomplish the same tasks of byte-copying to a file and vice-versa, but I haven't used them, since it was straight-forward with Linux.

Cheers

sport_billy said:

Thank you very much for this tutorial.

But what about us who have not made this backup when we had the original froyo and flashed the original 2.3.5?
I have several CWM backups but none of them works(it keeps booting in recovery mode or not booting at all),unless i restore to factory data which is useless.

Can you or someone else please upload a clean froyo backup so we can flash it and go back to our 2.2 backups via CWM?

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Click to collapse

It should be possible to dump and restore only the first two partitions, in which case it would make a much smaller up/download. This would restore the previous bootloader and allow CWM to operate normally ( or at least I hope so ).
I'll look into it.

EDIT: I dumped primary partitions 1, 2 and 3 to a image file which is around 140 MB after ziped. This could be enough to restore the old bootloader. "Could" is the keyword here, as it assumes the partition scheme is the same in every U8800.

sport_billy said:

bonowax can you please upload it so we can give it a try?
I am having bootloops even with the new beta v2 they released today.
So your solution is the only way to revert back to 2.2 .

Click to expand...

Click to collapse

Unfortunately there is the IMEI issue. I don't know where it is stored, and dumping from phone to phone might not be a good idea, unless we're talking about two devices you can actually get a hold of AND you do a full backup of both devices prior to any experiments...