HOWTO: Unbrick my old Optimus S, which hangs on "HydroRom Loading"

[Dark Penguin]

I have this old LG Optimus S which I haven't used as a daily phone in nearly two years, but I've kept it in a drawer just to have an extra media player to use on wi-fi at home. It was rooted and running HydroRom.

While trying to free up internal memory, I force-uninstalled a system app which apparently should not have been deleted, because now the phone won't boot up. It just hangs on the HydroRom graphic with the splashing drop of water, and won't go any farther. Unfortunately I don't remember which app I was deleting.

Is there any way I can at least put this phone back to stock condition, or open in recovery to see if something might be on the external card which I could use to restore it? Unfortunately, I don't seem to have an SD adapter that will work in any of my computers, so is there a way I can get around this? The main thing I want to do with it is stream Internet radio. We have a single-piece music player that does CDs, LPs, and OTA radio. We use the radio more than any of the other features, but let's face it, commercial OTA radio isn't that great what with all the commercials and unadventurous formats. The music player has a auxiliary jack which I can patch an Android device into.

I could use my current phone to do this, but it's more convenient to use my old spare Optimus mainly because of battery issues. If I play the phone through the stereo system and then need to go out, my battery might be half drained. If I can use the Optimus instead, I don't have to worry as much about the battery on my Galaxy.

 

[BradN2]

Which recovery do you have installed?

 

[nitestalkr]

While the phone is off, hold home, volume up, and the power button to boot into recovery mode, and reflash the rom. That will restore all system apps, and should solve your problem.

Sent from my LG-VM670 using Xparent Red Tapatalk 2

 

[Dark Penguin]

Thanks, Brad and Night for responding.

I found I was able to boot into recovery, but after that there's nothing available on the external card. I should have the card I used to keep in this phone, somewhere, but I can't find it. It's possible that the cards I've tried to use are corrupt, because my current main 16G external card works fine in my computer with the adapter I have.

The recovery is Xionia; forget the exact version number.

 

[BradN2]

I've had some problems with a LOT of SD cards in these phones but it turns out they were most likely all bad cards. Buying SD cards on ebay isn't always the best thing to do because failures can develop with time lag and because of such, seller feedback doesn't seem markedly impacted by selling bad cards.

After I started doing more thorough testing (writing random data and collecting write-out md5, md5 the card contents and compare) I discovered how bad a lot of cheap sd cards really are. Ended up buying a couple 16GB sandisks for walmart that at least work properly despite not hitting their speed class...