Couldn't leave well enough alone...

[Chris3D]

Well, I screwed something up. Rooted my phone no problem, removed all the bloat, everything was working perfectly. Then I got the idea to replace the stock browser apk and odex files with ones from the Vibrant... pretty much the same phone and the Vibrant isn't Binged, so why shouldn't it work?

Well, the phone starts up, hangs for a while at the Verizon animation and then goes to a blank screen. The phone is running, because I can use adb shell to get into it, navigate the directories and see all the files. But I can't seem to remove the added Browser.apk and odex files. Whenever I do "rm Browser.apk" it says permission denied.

When I su, it returns with "[1] + Stopped (signal) su"

Then when I try to remove the files again, it say:
"rm failed for Browser.apk, Permission denied
[1] Segmentation fault su"

Any ideas?

 

[DroidDev]

That means you were not able to get sudo or super user permissions. Ill research. Hopefully someone else can chime in, I know how frustrating it can be.

 

[Chris3D]

Yes, definitely not getting SU permission.

I used adb pull to copy the backed up stock Browser.apk.old and odex.old files to my computer, then adb push to copy them back as just apk and odex, presumably writing over the Vibrant files.

That seems to have helped, as the phone now boots up fine, but ADW is stuck in a force close loop now. When I do a su in adb, the window pops up on the phone asking for permission, but the phone won't register me clocking the allow button.

 

[Chris3D]

Almost there... I was able to allow su permission on the phone, just had to keep pressing the allow button to land a click between ADW force close messages. So I was able to use adb to remove the offending Vibrant apk and odex files, and use busybox to copy my backed up Fascinate ones back (renaming them from .old to .apk and odex...).

But ADW is still stuck in a force close loop.

 

[DroidDev]

I assume that is ADW launcher?

Uninstall it and re install it. See if that will help.

 

[Chris3D]

Tried that, but was greeted with not just ADW force closing, but an endless loop of multiple force closes!

Just stepped through Cory's instructions for getting out force close hell and I'm all back to stock... It'll take a little while to reconfigure it the way it was, but now I at least have ClockworkMod working and will make a backup.

All's well that ends well! Thanks for your help.

 

[namebrandon]

It happens.. Glad you were able to recover.

It's actually how I bricked my first Fascinate.. I did the exact same thing, to a "t" that you did, but I did it on the second day of the phone's release. Didn't have Odin, CWM or anything that point. It was not an enjoyable evening.

 

[Chris3D]

It's actually how I bricked my first Fascinate.. I did the exact same thing, to a "t" that you did, but I did it on the second day of the phone's release. Didn't have Odin, CWM or anything that point. It was not an enjoyable evening.

Wow, I can imagine that wasn't a particularly enjoyable experience...

Well, I'm *finally* back to where I started. For some reason, I couldn't get root to take after flashing Cory's Clockwork backup to escape the force-close loop. I could adb into the phone, and su just fine, the Superuser apk was installed and I could open it up, but for some reason, it would never pop up the message when a program tried to get root permissions... like Root Explorer.

I tried to re-root using the 1-click root, but it always failed, totally locking up the phone after the restart. Seems to have had something to do with Widows and the 64bit drivers - the phone would never show up in the Windows device manager after the restart... Ended up looking through the START_ROOT.bat and com.sh files, and using adb to execute the commands manually... worked like a charm.

I ended up reflashing the stock recovery over Clockwork just to get the OTA update to take. I know I could have installed the unsigned version through Clockwork (and I did at one point), but I just felt better knowing that I could return it to a state where the OTA updates would work.

Tomorrow, I'll re-install Clockwork and make a backup... I don't want to go through this again, but I gained a lot of knowledge in the process, so it's not all for naught.

Thanks again for your help guys...

 

[namebrandon]

One more thing to add, since it appears you're following closely in the footsteps of myself and others.. When your nandroid backup(s) for whatever reason tell you that the md5 checksums are invalid, don't ignore that warning and recreate valid checksums so that your backup will still flash. Took me about 12 hours to recover from that last weekend, it massively messed up the mbr and partitioning. Not worth the risk!

Make extra backups, and copy them off the sdcard to have an extra copy in case your sdcard goes wonky.