I had a Nexus 4 running stock Lollipop, no mods or anything. I say HAD because as of this morning I do believe the object formally known as a "Nexus 4" is now an expensive brick.
I should note that I suspect there's likely a cascading hardware failure of some sort. Out of nowhere last week I began having problems with the digitizer. Random keypresses on the screen when I'm not touching it, dead zones on the touch screen randomly forming requiring me to turn the screen off/on again, sometimes rotating the screen. I hoped the problem was some quirky software glitch so I booted into recovery mode and did a factory reset on my phone. Unfortunately, shortly after doing so the problem began happening again.
Anyway, the digitizer being quirky I can deal with. But this morning's problem may just lead to me grabbing a Lart and performing some percussive maintenance on this PoS. The problem would become unfixable at that point, but damned if I wouldn't feel some temporary relief...
So, I woke up this morning to the system shutting itself down and rebooting, upon rebooting it went to the 4-balls of endless doom. I attempted to boot into recovery mode and the robot with his service hatch open comes on screen for a few minutes and then the phone reboots into 4-balls again.
ONCE this morning I was actually able to get into recovery mode, but I noticed an error to the extent of "E:\Unable to mount /cache invalid argument" or something thereabout I attempted to wipe the /cache/ partition and it gave the same error and did NOT do anything. Anyway, I turned off my phone like an id10t figuring "I'll just come back later and **** with it when I have some free time later"
I figured if I could get into recovery mode once, I'd be able to get back to it again to do a factory reset. Unfortunately, after doing the factory reset last time I forgot to enable USB Debugging. So here I sit with "Nexus 4" showing up in my system tray in the "Safely Remove Hardware" bull****, but not showing up in ADB or Fastboot seemingly.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>adb devices
List of devices attached
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>fastboot devices
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>
I can get into the bootloader(where it gives me the options to: "Restart Bootloader", "Recovery Mode", "Power Off", and "Start") but choosing Recovery Mode just goes to the Android with the Service Hatch open followed by a restart a few minutes later back to the 4-balls.
Additionally, my phone once entered "Download Mode" which was interesting, I don't know how I got it there, but I did.
Any thoughts on how I might be able to get this SoB working? I have never opened the phone to remove the battery or anything along those lines, but I'm pretty sure I can find a small piece of plastic to pop the tabs if reseating the battery offers any hope of allowing me into recovery mode to try another factory reset.
This is my only phone, and since it's essentially a paperweight at the moment I really have nothing to lose.
EDIT: Small (but crappy) Update, I'm thinking my earlier diagnosis of "Cascading Hardware Failure" was more correct than I'd hoped. I managed to get the PC to recognize the connection with Fastboot, wiped out all the partitions(fastboot erase boot, cache, recovery, system). Those all seem to have completed successfully, but I ran into a problem when trying to reflash the device. When I attempted to flash the bootloader I encountered a problem indicating my internal flash storage is probably fubar.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>fastboot flash bootloader "bootloader-mako-makoz30f.img"
sending 'bootloader' (2264 KB)... OKAY [ 0.077s]
writing 'bootloader'... FAILED (remote: flash write failure)
finished.
total time: 0.085s
It seems strange to me that it would send the img file to the device successfully, but then **** out when it comes to extracting the image.
Well, this sucks.
I should note that I suspect there's likely a cascading hardware failure of some sort. Out of nowhere last week I began having problems with the digitizer. Random keypresses on the screen when I'm not touching it, dead zones on the touch screen randomly forming requiring me to turn the screen off/on again, sometimes rotating the screen. I hoped the problem was some quirky software glitch so I booted into recovery mode and did a factory reset on my phone. Unfortunately, shortly after doing so the problem began happening again.
Anyway, the digitizer being quirky I can deal with. But this morning's problem may just lead to me grabbing a Lart and performing some percussive maintenance on this PoS. The problem would become unfixable at that point, but damned if I wouldn't feel some temporary relief...
So, I woke up this morning to the system shutting itself down and rebooting, upon rebooting it went to the 4-balls of endless doom. I attempted to boot into recovery mode and the robot with his service hatch open comes on screen for a few minutes and then the phone reboots into 4-balls again.
ONCE this morning I was actually able to get into recovery mode, but I noticed an error to the extent of "E:\Unable to mount /cache invalid argument" or something thereabout I attempted to wipe the /cache/ partition and it gave the same error and did NOT do anything. Anyway, I turned off my phone like an id10t figuring "I'll just come back later and **** with it when I have some free time later"
I figured if I could get into recovery mode once, I'd be able to get back to it again to do a factory reset. Unfortunately, after doing the factory reset last time I forgot to enable USB Debugging. So here I sit with "Nexus 4" showing up in my system tray in the "Safely Remove Hardware" bull****, but not showing up in ADB or Fastboot seemingly.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>adb devices
List of devices attached
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>fastboot devices
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>
I can get into the bootloader(where it gives me the options to: "Restart Bootloader", "Recovery Mode", "Power Off", and "Start") but choosing Recovery Mode just goes to the Android with the Service Hatch open followed by a restart a few minutes later back to the 4-balls.
Additionally, my phone once entered "Download Mode" which was interesting, I don't know how I got it there, but I did.
Any thoughts on how I might be able to get this SoB working? I have never opened the phone to remove the battery or anything along those lines, but I'm pretty sure I can find a small piece of plastic to pop the tabs if reseating the battery offers any hope of allowing me into recovery mode to try another factory reset.
This is my only phone, and since it's essentially a paperweight at the moment I really have nothing to lose.
EDIT: Small (but crappy) Update, I'm thinking my earlier diagnosis of "Cascading Hardware Failure" was more correct than I'd hoped. I managed to get the PC to recognize the connection with Fastboot, wiped out all the partitions(fastboot erase boot, cache, recovery, system). Those all seem to have completed successfully, but I ran into a problem when trying to reflash the device. When I attempted to flash the bootloader I encountered a problem indicating my internal flash storage is probably fubar.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Min_ADB>fastboot flash bootloader "bootloader-mako-makoz30f.img"
sending 'bootloader' (2264 KB)... OKAY [ 0.077s]
writing 'bootloader'... FAILED (remote: flash write failure)
finished.
total time: 0.085s
It seems strange to me that it would send the img file to the device successfully, but then **** out when it comes to extracting the image.
Well, this sucks.
Last edited:
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