NOST - Improved Version of OST LA 6.0.4 (v0.6, 02. Mar 2019)

[THMSP]

"NOST" - short for "No Service Tool" (or "Nokia Service Tool" but that sounds too official and boring ) is a small hobby project I've been working on in the last couple of days.
It aims to make the service tool for Nokia 8 (and HMD Phones in general) more useable, user-friendly, and straigtforward to use, and after having to test it myself, and also
making a small beta test in the Telegram group for Nokia 8, I feel like posting it here so others can try it out too if they want.

First, to be clear: NOST is not completely my work. It is based on OST LA 6.0.4, which was made by HMD/Foxconn. Unlike the previous OST Patches, NOST does not replace
the executable with a hacked one, but instead wraps it and patches the methods that need patching at runtime. The result is that the changes are completely opensource
and readable by others, while the underlying OST files are not modified at all. I tried to base it on a different (i.e. newer) version of OST, but those are pretty much unpatchable,
at least not with a serious amount of reverse engineering, which brings not only time issues but legal ones as well.

NOST changes a couple of things, compared to the unmodified OST LA:

• It removes the need for authentification against HMD/FIH servers (really, shoutout to the one who made the original hack, even though I could not use their code)
• Moved the logs folder to the same folder as the application, as opposed to somewhere on the system to make debugging easier
• The options for flashing firmware images appear reliable now. (At least for me they only appeared sometimes if not never on the original OST).
• Removed one of the options that if it appeared crashed the flashing process ("Check System AP Status")
• One user of the Telegram group had issues where OST would crash because it detects an invalid locale setting in Windows. NOST just catches that issue and defaults to english
• Removed the "Edit Phone Information" button. It never worked and it's only purpose was to make the "Next" button appear, which works like it should now as well.
• NOST refuses to flash your phone if your bootloader isn't unlocked critically. The old OST would just try to flash but never make any progress which confuses inexperienced users.
• Perhaps the most important change: NOST allows to flash modified firmware images without the need to extract and modify them by hand.

With the original OST, people who wanted to reflash their phone had to download a firmware bundle, extract and edit it to be able to use it with OST LA 6.0.4, since the newer versions
had unpatchable issues that prevent using them. Repacking the images in a format OST expects wasn't possible either since that enabled some sort of signature algorithm on the modified
images and caused the flashing to fail. NOST solves this problem by allowing the use of a different packaging format. Those binaries still need to be extracted but it is done transparently in
the background without the user having to download any other tools. The formats that can be used in images are .zip and .qlz

.zip Firmwares:
.zip firmware files are simply archives of the (edited) files that would normally be extracted from an .nb0 file. This means, if you extract a .nb0 with the extractor found on XDA, the contents
of the *_unpacked folder it creates should be the contents of your .zip.

.qlz Firmwares:
.qlz files are based on QuickLZ compression, which gives them a small size but also a low decompression time.
The tool to generate them is called exdupe. Generating these images is pretty straigtforward. Assuming you are on windows, download the exdupe
tool from the link above (or take it from the NOST Tools/ folder) and copy it into the folder that contains the unpacked .nb0.

- exdupe.exe
- <nb0 name>_unpacked/
    - <nb0 name>.mlf
    - ....

Open a commandline in that folder, and run the following command:

exdupe.exe <name of the folder to compress> <name of the firmware file>.qlz

You should already see how fast it compresses the firmware folder now. As a reference: Compressing the latest Nokia 8 firmware (about 4GB) takes maybe 30 seconds and yields a 2GB file.

Repacked Firmware Bundles:
I created .qlz images of the May and November firmwares, as well as one of the various Pie Maintainance Releases.
You can find them here: https://tmsp.io/fs/xda/nb1/firmware
I already successfully reverted from December Security Patch to November using NOST, and then updated back using OTA Sideloading without problems.

As always when working with flashing tools, proceed with caution!

How to unlock to critical:

For those who wonder how to unlock into critical state :
Reboot into bootloader download mode and execute those commands :
fastboot flash unlock *unlock .bin*
fastboot flashing unlock_critical

Afterwards you should be able to flash provided .qlz with NOST.

Download:
The actual tool: https://github.com/StollD/NOST/releases
Drivers: https://github.com/StollD/nokia-driver-installer/tree/master/out
Source Code: https://github.com/StollD/NOST

License:
OST LA 6.0.4 is copyrighted by the respective authors. It is not modified permanently.
The custom NOST code is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Icon by Freepik © Flaticon

 

[reza6d]

I tried this is working,nice tool.
Thanks dev.

 

[OneWayGamer]

Thank you THMSP! very cool?

Sent from my TA-1004 using XDA Labs

 

[Lee Castro]

Can flash the May and November update but cannot flash latest Pie with this tool. I flashed Pie but returned back to November update?

 

[THMSP]

Can flash the May and November update but cannot flash latest Pie with this tool. I flashed Pie but returned back to November update?

Yes, you can revert back from Pie to Oreo using this. What is the issue with Pie for you?

 

[Lee Castro]

Yes, you can revert back from Pie to Oreo using this. What is the issue with Pie for you?

What I mean is if I flash the Pie file you provided I just returned back to Android 8.1 Novemeber update no changes at all. Maybe there something wrong with the Pie file you uploaded. But the rests are all working fine with the tool.

 

[THMSP]

What I mean is if I flash the Pie file you provided I just returned back to Android 8.1 Novemeber update no changes at all. Maybe there something wrong with the Pie file you uploaded. But the rests are all working fine with the tool.

Thanks for the hint, I will take a look. Probably just derped when pulling partitions and renaming the images (might have worked in my November folder by accident).


EDIT: I repulled the images from Pie (I indeed somehow worked in my November folder when making the image), repackaged them and updated the version in the drive folder. You should now be able to flash Pie. Sorry for the mistake.

 

[Lee Castro]

Thanks for the hint, I will take a look. Probably just derped when pulling partitions and renaming the images (might have worked in my November folder by accident).


EDIT: I repulled the images from Pie (I indeed somehow worked in my November folder when making the image), repackaged them and updated the version in the drive folder. You should now be able to flash Pie. Sorry for the mistake.

Thanks again,This is really a big help.

 

[KonikoO]

Wow, this is something we've been all seeking for a long time now ! For those who wonder how to unlock into critical state :
Reboot into bootloader download mode and execute those commands :
fastboot flash unlock *unlock .bin*
fastboot flashing unlock_critical

Afterwards you should be able to flash provided .qlz with NOST.

 

[Theobias]

hey there! wonderful tool to have. Thank u so much

 

[Blackhacker07]

Not working in my laptop say a software need a to update

 

[THMSP]

Not working in my laptop say a software need a to update

If you have dependency issues I would suggest to install OST LA 6.0.4 first, so you get its dependencies, until I can make a proper installer for NOST.

 

[ironman38102]

If you have dependency issues I would suggest to install OST LA 6.0.4 first, so you get its dependencies, until I can make a proper installer for NOST.

Could you perhaps figure out how to get rid of the unlocked bootloader message?

 

[THMSP]

Could you perhaps figure out how to get rid of the unlocked bootloader message?

Are you talking about the error message that appears when you press the Next button to start flashing?
If yes, your bootloader needs to be unlocked to critical, then the message won't appear.
If you are unsure if your bootloader is unlocked to critical, do "fastboot oem device-info", it will tell you.


If you mean the message that your phone displays when booting with an unlocked bootloader then sorry, I doubt that's possible (I think it is embedded into the bootloader).

 

[ironman38102]

Are you talking about the error message that appears when you press the Next button to start flashing?
If yes, your bootloader needs to be unlocked to critical, then the message won't appear.
If you are unsure if your bootloader is unlocked to critical, do "fastboot oem device-info", it will tell you.


If you mean the message that your phone displays when booting with an unlocked bootloader then sorry, I doubt that's possible (I think it is embedded into the bootloader).

Actually its in splash.img that can be dumped. Its the hex editing possibly that might be a problem for someone not familiar with it

 

[Blackhacker07]

How to flash it's says this...

 

[THMSP]

How to flash it's says this...

What do you mean?

 

[Arthetzki]

Wow, this is something we've been all seeking for a long time now ! For those who wonder how to unlock into critical state :
Reboot into bootloader download mode and execute those commands :
fastboot flash unlock *unlock .bin*
fastboot flashing unlock_critical

Afterwards you should be able to flash provided .qlz with NOST.

Thank you so much for this advice. I wouldn't have ever figured out how to unlock critical on my own and that was the thing that was preventing me from flashing. I tried searching the other OST LA flashing threads as well but this info seemed to have been missing, or then i completely missed it. Thank you so much anyways. If anybody else is trying to figure out why their OST LA or NOST is giving them the se_err_adb_cmd_get_fail_result error, this should help. I just used the unlock.key in place of the *unlock.bin* in your command and it worked.

 

[leyo1022]

Can you please upload Oreo December update stock and patched boot image. TIA

 

[THMSP]

Yesterday I noticed that my Pie Image was still not quite useable, since it contained a corrupted system partition.
This seems to have happened because of my Magisk Setup and me only replacing the boot partition image and not uninstalling Magisk completely.


I rebuilt the image, to be fully stock, and also included the latest B07 update that @hikari_calyx uploaded yesterday. You can get it from the drive link in the OP.