[How To] Recover from a soft brick

[designgears]

A soft brick, in this case, is when you make a bad edit to your framework files and the phone won't fully boot and starts flashing a red LED at you.

There is one catch, you only get about 1-2min to do all of this before the phone reboots on its own. If that happens, do SuperOneClick steps again and continue where you left off. Better yet, build a script to do it all for you

Power off your device

Enter Fastboot:
Hold Volume down + power until you see Fastboot at the top left

Use volume down to scroll down to "Early USB Enumeration" (only shows one item at a time, if you pass it, keep going down, up selects)
Press Volume up to select

Wait for ADB to enable, run "Shell Root" from SuperOneClick, wait until it says you have root.

Enter adb shell from command line, You should have root(#) access:
adb shell

Mount the system directory as read/write:
mount -o rw,remount /dev/block/mmcblk0p12 /system

Make a new directory on /data for your recovery files: (sdcard wont be mounted yet)
mkdir /data/recover

Exit adb shell:
exit

Push your known working files to the new directory:
adb push /path/to/local/file.ext /data/recovery

Enter adb shell from command line:
adb shell

Copy your newly pushed recovery files to their proper location:
cp /data/recover/services.jar /system/framework
cp /data/recover/framework.jar /system/framework
cp /data/recover/famework-res.apk /system/framework

Reboot:
reboot now

 

[psufan5]

Thanks! Extremely happy you are deving for this phone

 

[uskr]

What's the best way to backup my stock partitions before I keep playing with those files?

Titan Backup works for that?

Or just a tar cf /mnt/sdcard/systembackup.tar /system , works?

Thanks in advance.

 

[designgears]

What's the best way to backup my stock partitions before I keep playing with those files?

Titan Backup works for that?

Or just a tar cf /mnt/sdcard/systembackup.tar /system , works?

Thanks in advance.

I would just use the tar solution, much easier to deal with.

You can also use ADB, adb pull /system system

Also, the retail dump I did matched my phone dump bit for bit, as long as you have that you should be fine.

 

[uskr]

Thanks! I am messing around with the APKs and scripts to get the webtop to work without the dock. So I wanted to make sure I was covered.

 

[lpsi2000]

I would just use the tar solution, much easier to deal with.

You can also use ADB, adb pull /system system

Also, the retail dump I did matched my phone dump bit for bit, as long as you have that you should be fine.

I already did both adb pull of system and tar, but how did you do the retail dump?

 

[designgears]

I already did both adb pull of system and tar, but how did you do the retail dump?

tar dump as root of system

 

[uskr]

One last question.

Once I deodex my /system/app, should I just do a adb push app /system/app and then rm /system/app/*.odex ?

I am used to use the update.zip trick on the captivate. But I am not sure how to proceed on this phone.

 

[designgears]

One last question.

Once I deodex my /system/app, should I just do a adb push app /system/app and then rm /system/app/*.odex ?

I am used to use the update.zip trick on the captivate. But I am not sure how to proceed on this phone.

push apps, then push framework, reboot, then delete all the odex files, reboot

from system do something like; find . -name "*.odex" -exec rm {} \;

 

[lpsi2000]

push apps, then push framework, reboot, then delete all the odex files, reboot

from system do something like; find . -name "*.odex" -exec rm {} \;

Unrelated to this, I could sware yesterday I got to the recovery screen where I was able to wipe stuff and also be able to use update.zip. Although I did not use and update files but saw the option there. Today I am looking everywhere but the recovery screen does not come up with the options. I only see exclamation point and the droid. May be I am going nuts but can anyone confirm this.

 

[designgears]

Unrelated to this, I could sware yesterday I got to the recovery screen where I was able to wipe stuff and also be able to use update.zip. Although I did not use and update files but saw the option there. Today I am looking everywhere but the recovery screen does not come up with the options. I only see exclamation point and the droid. May be I am going nuts but can anyone confirm this.

tap at the bottom right of the screen right above the search button

 

[lpsi2000]

tap at the bottom right of the screen right above the search button

ahha, thank you. Now I know I am going crazy. I used it yesterday to wipe when the system was unstable on me after playing around with the framework. I am must have stumble on that by accident. I am wondering if this documented yet somewhere around here.

Also too bad we cannot get root from there yet.

 

[realawill]

Well thank you for this. So when it boots to run, does it do a sys check to verify files are the same size or what? Anyway went to my local AT&T store and they swapped it out for me.

 

[designgears]

Well thank you for this. So when it boots to run, does it do a sys check to verify files are the same size or what? Anyway went to my local AT&T store and they swapped it out for me.

No, I just made a bad edit and it was FC hell

 

[azy8000]

IT DOES NOT WORK WITH ME
I have been trying this trick for many times. The device restart and SuperOneClick hanging without any result.

 

[realawill]

No, I just made a bad edit and it was FC hell

Crazy....mine just would not reboot. But good to know that there is a way to recover. Love the phone but hate Motorola. Wish that it was easy as the Cappy.

 

[connexion2005]

Cool stuff. I may snatch the framework off the phone in stock form and make a batch package for this so folks can easily just double click to restore their framework and system app folder.

Good work DG...

 

[connexion2005]

I never get past that initial... Starting RSD protocol support screen. Is that fast boot? If so I'm a retard...

EDIT: I need the face palm sticky. It's not Volume UP...it's Volume Down. Reading comprehension for the loss...

 

[designgears]

IT DOES NOT WORK WITH ME
I have been trying this trick for many times. The device restart and SuperOneClick hanging without any result.

I have done this several times now, it works

 

[shawnbuck]

I soft bricked my Atrix earlier this morning, and used this to recover. The time limit is a serious pain!

I ended up needing to separate /system into 5 separate pushes of 30MB each in order to get them done in time.

Oddly, after restoring everything, the phone is no longer associated with my motoblur account, and I can't add it.

Also, I think there my be some files in /system that are unaccounted for by the filesystem, as there is 70MB more than what is present.

Edit:
Restoring the system fixed both above problems.