OTA jellybean update ate my SDcard.

[George Stein]

Wonder if maybe someone here has any ideas. The good folks at AT&T did an OTA update to my HTC One X to Jellybean (went to bed, it was ICS, woke up, it's JB), and wiped the SDcard in the process. It appears to have been factory reset. Thought I had OTA updates turned off, grrrr. Anyhow, Problem is, all of our vacation pics from last week are on the phone and I hadn't had a chance to download them yet. I am trying to figure out a way to extract an image of the SDCard to run some file recovery software, but the USB filesystem is apparently GPhoto2 now, not FAT, and the root exploits have been plugged. I tried getting an image of the SDcard using ADB by pulling the SDcard driver file, but can't do that without root permissions. Any thoughts on how to extract a binary image of the SDcard or do any other sort of file recovery for a formatted SDcard on this thing? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Phone is totally stock.

Thanks, George

 

[cyanogen-man]

I'm gonna be the bad guy here and be blunt... If it Incact factory reset your phone you lost everything unless you have a copy of the pics somewhere else factory data reset wipes the whole phone it's like you just got it out the box for the first time

Sent from my HTC One X+ using Android Central ForuMs

 

[leesumm]

You don't make mention of anything about connecting your phone to computer prior to the OTA , if by chance you connected to the PC with HTC sync its possible your pics are on the PC in backups. Just a thought.

 

[loraque]

There is also the fact that the phone will not register as a drive anymore after JB. The drivers on your system need to be updated to support the MTP device that Android JB presents as now. Is it possible that the reason you cannot see those files is because you have not updated the drivers on your PC? Does it pop up a box when you plug in your phone, or what exactly happens when you do now? It IS possible for your SD card to get corrupted and require to be reformatted. If that is the case here, I do not think there is anything you can do without root... possibly not with it, to retrieve lost data. Dropbox picture sync maybe?

But I would make sure you are not butting into the file transfer change from ICS to JB.

 

[George Stein]

Unfortunately, I hadn't plugged the phone in to make a backup yet. My wife's phone received the same JB update. It was stone dead for about a day afterward, then suddenly sprang to life but was really flaky, so I did a factory reset on it. The reset only took about 10 or 15 seconds to complete which leads me to believe it only does a quick format rather than zeroing out all of the memory. I was hoping that maybe somebody knows of a file system link or non-root app or utility that would have access to the raw SDcard image. Recovery software would do the rest. Of course, life won't end if I don't get the pictures back, but my wife will be happier.

On a related note, new rules to live by. Never EVER buy a phone without removable storage and battery, Never EVER buy a non-rootable phone, and ALWAYS avoid evil narcissist cellphone companies (if such a thing is possible).

 

[George Stein]

The file transfer change is the problem. Previously, the phone appeared as a mounted FAT file system, it was possible to simply look at the mount table, then use the linux command "dd if="phone file system device" of="image file", mount the image file then run file recovery software. My understanding is that now the phones file system is not mountable on a computer through the USB port. Instead, files are passed out individually by the phones operating system so there is no way to gain access to the file system to do recovery. Apparently Jellybean has a setup option to restore this functinality, but it appears to be disabled in the AT&T version. Somebody went to a lot of effort to make sure you are unnecessarily screwed if your phone becomes corrupted without a backup. :<

 

[loraque]

A factory reset does not wipe /sdcard... I suspect that damage/formatted state was a result of the update.

It is unfortunate the way things are regarding security on these devices. I actually waited for the root exploit to be out before I bought our OneX's and did all that right away, before things could change on me. We were coming from the Gnex, so definitely did not want to give up the ability to do a real backup. A lot of the dev people have left the One X I think, for the greener pastures of the One. Not sure if we can rely on there being a new root found for the 3.18 firmware.

EDIT- I could be wrong on reset thing, depending on which one you did. I always do the factory reset from Recovery, and that doesn't wipe the sd. I do not know if the one you can start from within Sense however does a more thorough job. I might, I have not done that one before.

 

[George Stein]

/sdcard (/sdcard0) doesn't appear to have been formatted when I did the factory reset on my wife's phone, so I may be wrong about my problem being the result of some sort of factory reset. My battery was at about 20% that night and was totally dead in the morning, so I suspect it ran out of battery part way through the update. Probably munched the file system when the battery died then did a recovery by reformatting /sdcard when I powered it up the next morning. Might stop by the repair center to see if they can do anything before giving up, but I doubt it. Task key and back key lights don't work so might as well see if I can get a replacement phone while I am there.

Not too impressed with JB so far, it feels like a "not quite ready for prime time" update. The phone doesn't "feel" very stable. Google navigation, which I use a lot, seems to be rather twitchy now, and it wants to continually default to AT&T paid navigation. Can't find the option to turn off OTA updates either, although that option didn't seem to do anything useful in ICS. Hopefully the rest of the OS hasn't been improved too badly, or maybe a factory reset will make it better

Thanks for the help, George.

 

[cyanogen-man]

A nother thing about ota is you really want to do it through WiFi and any ota in general you want to make sure the battery is 100% or the system can crash as it will be runnerng your cpu like race car to install the new file system and reportian the data partitions updating the api all that good stuff and yes ics and jelly bean have different file systems so it's highly possible that when it converted to the new file system it reformated the internal Sd partition and earased everything
Sent from my HTC One X+ using Android Central Forums

 

[cyanogen-man]

The only thing I can suggest would be to get a file explorer and see if you can acess them that way sometimes they can be difficult to navigate good luck I just 're read the other post and you said the battery was basically dead? Never do that that has Caused soo many problems for people it rudely takes about 35% battery to do something like that maybe the minor stuff like a .1 upgrade but a whole new version of android takes some battery that dual core chip mite be fast but it's like running a v12 viper on a 12 gallon tank your not gonna go far at all

Sent from my HTC One X+ using Android Central Forums

 

[loraque]

Re Navigation

Many phones on JB cannot run Navigation, without Maps crashing a few seconds into it. This is not our phones specifically, but that doesn't make me feel better about it. I cannot run Navigation either.

There are two options that I have found. First, if you hit the HOME button right as Nav starts to route, it will usually run in the background and tell you when to turn. If you want to be able to look at the map, or just do not want to deal with this anymore (This is me, fought this for months on CM 10 too) install Waze. Waze seems to use the same back end stuff, so you will get where you need to go. The voice over is not as good, but good enough.

 

[cyanogen-man]

I haven't had a single problem with navigation since I got my phone rite before thanks giving then again mine came with jbvout the box but still hmm may be its an api problem have you made sure maps is upto date?

Sent from my HTC One X+ using Android Central Forums

 

[loraque]

Yes. This is a known issue on many HTC phones across carriers. Ever since the first CM10, this issue is out there. Something graphics related with the hardware in our phones. My wife's HOX works fine in JB Nav, but not mine. There are numerous posts in every JB custom ROM thread about it. Maybe 10% failure. Google Jellybean Navigation problems, and there are posts in every carrier about it. Very annoying. Thankfully Waze fills the gap good enough.

 

[cyanogen-man]

Hmm intresting mite be a GPS bug

Sent from my HTC One X+ using Android Central Forums

 

[leesumm]

I am rooted running viper xl 3.2.8, but I have an app from the app store that is ES File explorer, I don't think it asks for root permission, so you might look at that app and see if you can use it. It will read the SD Card and you might somehow find if you lost anything on the card. With that app I can see a file DCIM and my pics are in that folder. Another app is Astro File Manager from the app store, it will integrate with Drop Box so if you have anything on the SD Card you might be able to upload to Drop Box and then download to your PC . I also don't know if you can use these apps if your not rooted, but worth a try.

 

[George Stein]

I gave up, Jellybean from AT&T seems locked down pretty tight. The time spent trying to gain access isn't really worth it. Not sure why they would go to that effort to restrict access to internal storage since none of their bloatware necessarily uses it. Guess we can't be trusted with our own data. On the other hand, after doing a factory reset of JB the phone seems a lot more stable. Navigation works smoothly. Love Android, Despise the evil overloards who are gunking it up with their sadistic, narcissistic machinations. Thanks for the suggestions. George.

 

[Ruairaidh]

There is also the fact that the phone will not register as a drive anymore after JB. The drivers on your system need to be updated to support the MTP device that Android JB presents as now. Is it possible that the reason you cannot see those files is because you have not updated the drivers on your PC? Does it pop up a box when you plug in your phone, or what exactly happens when you do now? It IS possible for your SD card to get corrupted and require to be reformatted. If that is the case here, I do not think there is anything you can do without root... possibly not with it, to retrieve lost data. Dropbox picture sync maybe?

But I would make sure you are not butting into the file transfer change from ICS to JB.

I'm also having a problem since the update. I backed up three different ways, but now I can't restore my data because I can't view my HTC One X as a drive on my Mac (OS 10.7.5), where I saved the backup files. I can, if need be, move the backup files to my NAS and try accessing them via my WinXp laptop, but that machine is incredibly slow. I'd like to be able to fix this issue from my Mac and thus be able to access the phone in future.

No, I did not root the phone at any time.

Thank you for any help you can provide!

 

[Ruairaidh]

I'm also having a problem since the update. I backed up three different ways, but now I can't restore my data because I can't view my HTC One X as a drive on my Mac (OS 10.7.5), where I saved the backup files. I can, if need be, move the backup files to my NAS and try accessing them via my WinXp laptop, but that machine is incredibly slow. I'd like to be able to fix this issue from my Mac and thus be able to access the phone in future.

No, I did not root the phone at any time.

Thank you for any help you can provide!

Okay, I just discovered I can drag/drop into the HTC Sync Manager... hopefully that sorts things out.

 

[loraque]

I am not a Mac guy, but I have heard that this app should do the trick.

Android.com

 

[Ruairaidh]

I am not a Mac guy, but I have heard that this app should do the trick.

Android.com

Thanks. I had managed to transfer my backup files (from the My Backup app) via the HTC Sync program, however now that I've installed them I keep getting an error message that HTC Sense has stopped. I wonder if it replaced the appropriate HTC Sense file with a pre-update file. :-/

I can't figure out how to re-start it from within the settings menu. The result is that when the screen is unlocked, nothing appears on my home screen. I can only launch the apps that are visible when the phone is locked, by dragging them into the unlock ring. Will be investigating, but if anyone has any suggestions in the meantime, they would be appreciated. My boyfriend, an iPhone user, keeps urging me to just take it to the store and let them fix it. =) Silly boy...