[kwlug-disc] [Android] I have a very expensive paperweight

[Keefer Rourke]

On 30 April 2015 at 00:33, Nick Guenther <nguenthe at uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

>
> I had no idea you could flash the partition table like this. That is
> fantastic. Where did you learn this? Do you know anyway to read the
> partitions out over fastboot?
>

The sources for my instructions were assembled from several shoddy sources,
mostly poorly written forum posts that tell you what to do when you have an
issue, but not how it fixes it or why it does.

The `fastboot flash partition gpt.bin` thing seems to be specific to the
Motorola devices I mentioned previously, but I haven't done enough research
to see if it applies to older gen devices, or if other manufacturers also
implement something similar. However, my Nexus 7 2012 is also currently in
a state where I can't get an operating system on it, likely because of a
missing or corrupted system partition. Unfortunately I haven't found an
easy way to repair the partitions on it, like I did with my Moto G. Since
the Nexus factory images are readily available without hunting, and upon
inspection there is nothing comparable to the gpt.bin, I'm going to assume
this process is probably just specific to Moto devices, but don't quote me
on that.

Do you know anyway to read the partitions out over fastboot? That doesn't
> exist, right?


>From fastboot, getting partition information is quite limited. As far as I
know, the best you can do is try running `fastboot getvar all` and that'll
give you your bootloader-version, baseband-version, serial number and
product name and information, whether or not the bootloader is locked, and
some very limited information about the existing partitions, namely size
and fs type. It probably won't tell you about unallocated memory or if
you're missing partitions though.

If you want to read partitions out using adb, you can access the root shell
using `adb shell` and then execute `cat /proc/partitions` to get
information about what's there, but it's not very human readable. The
better way to get partition info from the adb shell is to use `ls -la
/dev/block/platform/dw_mmc/by-name`.



> On my softbricked device, the partitions remaining don't speak fastboot.
> It's a big problem.
>

Fastboot only speaks with the bootloader, so if you don't have a bootloader
on your device, it might be a huge issue. If you mean adb however, it can
speak with some recoveries (like CWM or TWRP), and Android itself. Fastboot
is the really important one because it's largely what you use for system
repair, but you can use adb to diagnose issues if you can get a session
running.

Cheers,
Keefer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/attachments/20150430/3f7dff5b/attachment.htm>