Hey guys,
I decided to share my horrible experience - as title says - with lost IMEI.
Some of you may remember that couple of months ago there were some posts here regarding lost IMEI and possible solutions and questions how is it possible to loose IMEI in the first place.
I remember at least three guys managed to do that by running "fastboot erase all".
What was my story?
Yesterday I decided to flash a new recovery (last two months I haven´t flashed anything and wasn´t active on the forum because of lack of time and I started to show signs of withdrawal syndrome
). My first mistake was that I flashed non-gpe recovery to my device with GPE rom, obviously that couldn´t work because of incompatibility in file systems. Nevermind, that happened before and it´s easy to go back to a proper recovery. But not this time. Tried hundred times, but flashing with fastboot always ended up by "OKAY" but the old recovery remained in place for some reason unknown to me. And also the system wouldn´t boot. Out of desperation I ran "fastboot erase recovery", that wouldn´t help either. In the end I got out of the situation by booting (not flashing) to a proper recovery (fastboot boot recovery recovery.img) and restoring system from a nandroid backup. All seemed fine. ROM booted OK and then I realized I had no service and IMEI: unknown.
The only reason for that was obviously this unfortunate move: fastboot erase recovery. Anything else I did was pretty much "normal".
Here comes the second part of the story.
I downloaded my cloud-stored pds.img backup (lucky me I have it I thought to myself) but that didn´t prove to be of any use.
When running
as seen on
http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2537119
nothing happened. Dd ran too fast, just a fraction of a second and after reboot still IMEI: unknown.
To cut the long story short, after hours of searching for a possible solution (and thinking what would be my next phone) I finally came across this post:
http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=45881991&postcount=86
and tried that very easy method and it worked!
Takeaway messages:
1. don´t use fastboot erase "all" or "recovery" (other partitions may be erased without problems)
2. pds partition backup and restore method didn´t work for me
3. working solution (at least for me):
Remove sim, flash stock firmware using standard methods, boot to home screen, power off, insert sim, reboot and your IMEI should be back!
I decided to share my horrible experience - as title says - with lost IMEI.
Some of you may remember that couple of months ago there were some posts here regarding lost IMEI and possible solutions and questions how is it possible to loose IMEI in the first place.
I remember at least three guys managed to do that by running "fastboot erase all".
What was my story?
Yesterday I decided to flash a new recovery (last two months I haven´t flashed anything and wasn´t active on the forum because of lack of time and I started to show signs of withdrawal syndrome
). My first mistake was that I flashed non-gpe recovery to my device with GPE rom, obviously that couldn´t work because of incompatibility in file systems. Nevermind, that happened before and it´s easy to go back to a proper recovery. But not this time. Tried hundred times, but flashing with fastboot always ended up by "OKAY" but the old recovery remained in place for some reason unknown to me. And also the system wouldn´t boot. Out of desperation I ran "fastboot erase recovery", that wouldn´t help either. In the end I got out of the situation by booting (not flashing) to a proper recovery (fastboot boot recovery recovery.img) and restoring system from a nandroid backup. All seemed fine. ROM booted OK and then I realized I had no service and IMEI: unknown.The only reason for that was obviously this unfortunate move: fastboot erase recovery. Anything else I did was pretty much "normal".
Here comes the second part of the story.
I downloaded my cloud-stored pds.img backup (lucky me I have it I thought to myself) but that didn´t prove to be of any use.
When running
Code:
adb shell
su
dd if=/sdcard/pds.img of=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/pdshttp://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2537119
nothing happened. Dd ran too fast, just a fraction of a second and after reboot still IMEI: unknown.
To cut the long story short, after hours of searching for a possible solution (and thinking what would be my next phone) I finally came across this post:
http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=45881991&postcount=86
and tried that very easy method and it worked!
Takeaway messages:
1. don´t use fastboot erase "all" or "recovery" (other partitions may be erased without problems)
2. pds partition backup and restore method didn´t work for me
3. working solution (at least for me):
Remove sim, flash stock firmware using standard methods, boot to home screen, power off, insert sim, reboot and your IMEI should be back!
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