[BRICK WARNING]Dont clear phone via Menu>Privacy after custom rec

[box0112]

Yea so I just bricked my LG optimus when i was flashing thunder-rom i linked the wrong gmail account and decided to do a clear settings via Privacy to remove the email. After I did that, it rebooted and now its stuck in the Recovery Menu and just keeps booting into it. I tried reflashing and restore NAND, but that doesnt work and still boots into the same screen.

This is just a heads up for those that might be doing the same. I wish someone warned me ahead of time, but hopefully this thread helps someone before for they do any clearing.

Hopefully a fix will come out for this one day.

Please subscribe to this thread if this happened to you too.

** UPDATE 12/27 **
Right now if your bricked your phone like i did. You can unbrick it by following the UNROOTING thread which is stickied on this main forum. basically what it does it load up a custom recovery file and then you nand flash with the provided file in that unrooting thread. And it worked after that. It took me about 10-15 min to do all of that. wasnt hard at all if your used to the ADB shell.

** UPDATE 1/19/2011 **
Fixed another one with the same problem. Solution is confirmed A-OKAY!

 

[KSmithInNY]

Once you have a custom recovery, you can/should do a wipe through recovery (wipe factory/data). This will wipe all your data. For whatever reason, once a custom recovery is installed, when you try to wipe from the privacy menu, you'll screw your phone up.

It should be clarified that ANYONE WITH A CUSTOM RECOVERY on their optimus S should not do the wipe through privacy. It doesn't matter if you are on LG's stock ROM or not. Once you have a custom recovery, wiping through privacy will mess up your phone. Stock phones, or rooted phones with a stock recovery are absolutely fine. This would only impact phones that have a custom recovery.

Someone is probably going to miss me saying this so it's worth repeating .... IF YOU HAVE A CUSTOM RECOVERY, YOU NEED TO DO YOUR DATA WIPES THROUGH THE RECOVERY (wipe factory/data) NOT THROUGH THE PRIVACY MENU UNTIL THIS GETS SORTED OUT!!!

 

[simon.ponder]

ADB

Someone who has a bricked phone, can you please attempt to achieve an adb connection?

@box0112

Can you please attempt to achieve an adb connection?

 

[basketthis]

Someone who has a bricked phone, can you please attempt to achieve an adb connection?

good idea. maybe a thread for this would be good that can go more in depth?

 

[simon.ponder]

Thread

good idea. maybe a thread for this would be good that can go more in depth?

I wanted to see if it was possible before making it a prominent thread.

 

[KSmithInNY]

alright now that the warning is out of the way ..... I'd love to get my hands on one of these "bricked" phones to see truly how bricked they are. I'm not going to brick my phone for the sake of science (my phone has done enough for the community lol) so I'm hoping someone with ADB knowledge and some free time has one of these phones in their hand.

I feel like, as long as you can get to recovery, 99% of all problems can be solved with a little ADB work.

1) Does ADB recognize the phone (must be in recovery).
2) Does wiping factory/data/cache help?
3) Have you tried flashing a custom ROM? (make special note of any errors)
4) Have you tried following the instructions to bring your phone back to stock?

Just need to know what has or has not been done which will assist in future ideas.

 

[drellisdee]

alright now that the warning is out of the way ..... I'd love to get my hands on one of these "bricked" phones to see truly how bricked they are. I'm not going to brick my phone for the sake of science (my phone has done enough for the community lol) so I'm hoping someone with ADB knowledge and some free time has one of these phones in their hand.

I feel like, as long as you can get to recovery, 99% of all problems can be solved with a little ADB work.

1) Does ADB recognize the phone (must be in recovery).
2) Does wiping factory/data/cache help?
3) Have you tried flashing a custom ROM? (make special note of any errors)
4) Have you tried following the instructions to bring your phone back to stock?

Just need to know what has or has not been done which will assist in future ideas.

Has this guy tried any of these steps? On all my phones D1, ally ,and Dinc privacy wipe will route you to custom recovery to wipe. If you can access recovery and or fastboot YOU ARE NOT BRICKED!! Bricked is when your phone will not power on at all. Its possible that lg's privacy wipe messed up the mtd partition table and zefie has a method using flash erase to recover if that is indeed the case.

 

[KSmithInNY]

Has this guy tried any of these steps? On all my phones D1, ally ,and Dinc privacy wipe will route you to custom recovery to wipe. If you can access recovery and or fastboot YOU ARE NOT BRICKED!! Bricked is when your phone will not power on at all. Its possible that lg's privacy wipe messed up the mtd partition table and zefie has a method using flash erase to recover if that is indeed the case.

I believe that is exactly the case (mtd partition theory). We'll see if someone with one of these phones can provide information.

 

[fifedogg]

Is there anyway to take that setting out of your rom KSmith so other poeple can't do it?

 

[trekkie1701c]

Might take it out, though I'd post have it up in the custom recovery thread. Aside from that, iirc it asks you several times if you're sure you really want to wipe your phone.

Though good thing someone posted this, I was having issues with an app crashing my phone and almost got to the point of doing a privacy wipe and starting over...

 

[beachfunk]

Has this guy tried any of these steps? On all my phones D1, ally ,and Dinc privacy wipe will route you to custom recovery to wipe. If you can access recovery and or fastboot YOU ARE NOT BRICKED!! Bricked is when your phone will not power on at all. Its possible that lg's privacy wipe messed up the mtd partition table and zefie has a method using flash erase to recover if that is indeed the case.

I did a search for Zefie's flash erase in the forum, as I have the same issue with the recovery boot loop, you have a link?

 

[simon.ponder]

With any of these ideas, we would still need adb, right?

 

[sabauman]

Has this guy tried any of these steps? On all my phones D1, ally ,and Dinc privacy wipe will route you to custom recovery to wipe. If you can access recovery and or fastboot YOU ARE NOT BRICKED!! Bricked is when your phone will not power on at all. Its possible that lg's privacy wipe messed up the mtd partition table and zefie has a method using flash erase to recover if that is indeed the case.

I did this exactly to my phone. cleared phone through privacy menu with custom recovery my phone was in a loop that would only take me to the custom recovery menu. I then followed the steps in the "how to - return to stock" thread. I could adb just fine and followed the instructions exactly and my phone is 100% back. This works. Again, personally tested on my LG Optimus S.

 

[zefie]

can you tear open the smali and see if you can tell which reboot command its issuing... most apps have to send a reboot command like "recovery" "bootloader" "oem-##", which make the phone reboot and perform random functions.

HOWEVER, we can intercept this in the kernel. So for the sake of example say this function sends reboot "oem-81". in my kernel I can just hook that into a standard reboot or a recovery reboot.

see if its something like "flasherase" or "eraseall" or some thing.

 

[sabauman]

alright now that the warning is out of the way ..... I'd love to get my hands on one of these "bricked" phones to see truly how bricked they are. I'm not going to brick my phone for the sake of science (my phone has done enough for the community lol) so I'm hoping someone with ADB knowledge and some free time has one of these phones in their hand.

I feel like, as long as you can get to recovery, 99% of all problems can be solved with a little ADB work.

1) Does ADB recognize the phone (must be in recovery). YES
2) Does wiping factory/data/cache help? NO
3) Have you tried flashing a custom ROM? NO (make special note of any errors)
4) Have you tried following the instructions to bring your phone back to stock? YES this worked to bring the phone back from the grave as long as you can get to recovery
Just need to know what has or has not been done which will assist in future ideas.

Answers are above in quote

 

[KSmithInNY]

Answers are above in quote

Perfect, thanks for replying. Back to what myself and drellisdee were saying, when the PC can talk to the phone .... you're not bricked. You may have to jump through a couple of hoops to get back to a good place but that's not the same as bricking your phone. If you can only see the spalsh screen (lg logo), no recovery, no system, that's a brick. Same goes for if the phone won't turn on. The reason these are bricks is because if the phone and the PC can't talk, then you don't have any way to tell the phone what you'd like to do to fix it.

When you can get to recovery, 99% of the time you'll be just fine

I am still curious about what happens if someone flashed a custom ROM if:
a) Does it throw an error during flashing?
b) No errors but still won't boot?
c) All is good and well.

To test this, someone with a phone in this condition could just download a ROM onto your PC and transfer it onto the root of the SD card either by using a card reader connected to their PC or by connecting their phone to the PC using mount as usb. Once you have the ROM on the root of SD, wipe factory, cache, and dalvik and flash the ROM. Again please pay very close attention to any errors shown on the screen and the behavior post flashing. Replying with something like "it didn't work" isn't going to help anybody.

 

[box0112]

ok i can connect it to the computer and i can adb shell into the phone. now on the root of the shell i see this after ls:

/ # ls -l
ls -l
drwxrwx--x 1 1000 1000 2048 Dec 22 07:34 cache
drwxrwx--x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 data
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 5597 Jan 1 1970 default.prop
drwxr-xr-x 13 0 0 3140 Dec 22 23:20 dev
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 etc
-rwxr-x--- 1 0 0 111924 Jan 1 1970 init
-rwxr-x--- 1 0 0 611 Jan 1 1970 init.rc
dr-xr-xr-x 67 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 proc
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 res
drwx------ 2 0 0 0 Oct 13 13:55 root
drwxr-x--- 2 0 0 0 Dec 22 23:20 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 sd-ext
drwxrwxrwx 10 0 0 16384 Dec 22 23:26 sdcard
drwxr-xr-x 12 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 sys
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 system
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Dec 22 23:20 tmp
/ #


i also pushed the new thunderrom15.zip to the root. or does it have to be elsewhere?

thanks

 

[zefie]

ok i can connect it to the computer and i can adb shell into the phone. now on the root of the shell i see this after ls:

/ # ls -l
ls -l
drwxrwx--x 1 1000 1000 2048 Dec 22 07:34 cache
drwxrwx--x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 data
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 0 5597 Jan 1 1970 default.prop
drwxr-xr-x 13 0 0 3140 Dec 22 23:20 dev
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 etc
-rwxr-x--- 1 0 0 111924 Jan 1 1970 init
-rwxr-x--- 1 0 0 611 Jan 1 1970 init.rc
dr-xr-xr-x 67 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 proc
drwxr-xr-x 3 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 res
drwx------ 2 0 0 0 Oct 13 13:55 root
drwxr-x--- 2 0 0 0 Dec 22 23:20 sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 sd-ext
drwxrwxrwx 10 0 0 16384 Dec 22 23:26 sdcard
drwxr-xr-x 12 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 sys
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Jan 1 1970 system
drwxr-xr-x 2 0 0 0 Dec 22 23:20 tmp
/ #


i also pushed the new thunderrom15.zip to the root. or does it have to be elsewhere?

thanks

adb shell mount /sdcard
adb push thunderrom15.zip /sdcard/

mounting sdcard is important if you are going through ADB since its not mounted by default.

try to flash using normal methods.

If that doesn't work, I'll give you step my step to restore your nand partitions.

Also kSmith keep me up to date about that reboot command.

 

[box0112]

nope its not working. i just flashed the thunderROM 1.5 and same thing just goes to the Android system recovery... i still have the existing nand i first backed up in the sdcard/nandroid if that helps.

also i read on the other thread about unrooting your phone. i got up to the point where i had to do flash_image recovery recovery.img (but for the nand backup i have, there is no recovery.img).

thanks

 

[zefie]

doesnt sound like a flash issue it is either android booting it back because it doesnt think its done or the bootloader. try connecting adb shell in recovery

adb shell reboot recovery

let it come back to recovery

adb shell reboot

see if that works