[kwlug-disc] [Android] I have a very expensive paperweight

[Nick Guenther]

On 28/04/15 11:20 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 10:33 PM, Keefer Rourke <keefer.rourke at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Has anyone gone through anything similar with corrupted memory on their
>> devices, or dealt with restoring to stock firmware on non-Nexus devices?
>> Any advice?
>
> So, my advice is to look for TWRP for your specific device. This is a
> custom recovery that can do a lot of things, including reflashing, changing
> file systems, backup, ...etc.
> If you can't find TWRP, then look for ClockWorkMod (CWM).

For future reference, you should never be "searching" for TWRP, you 
should be "selecting" it from their official releases at 
http://teamw.in/Devices/. There seem to currently be two "Moto G" 
devices listed, so you're in luck. If they didn't, there is a way to do 
it yourself, though it is a bit of an investment: the source is at 
https://github.com/omnirom/android_bootable_recovery, a build guide is 
at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1943625, and note 
that you need to find a BoardConfig.mk file which will be provided with 
the kernel source code that the manufacturer is, per the GPL, supposed 
to provide somewhere on their website.

Once you have it you can run it by getting into fastboot mode on your 
device (which is unfortunately not entirely standard) and then doing
`fastboot boot twrp.img`
(you can also `fastboot flash recovery twrp.img`, but it writes to flash 
instead of to RAM so be wary of doing that, certainly be wary without a 
backup of the original recovery partition).

In theory you could use a different recovery system besides TWRP, but 
TWRP is the best by far at the moment. However, if your bootloader is 
stuck locked, you won't be able to use it and you will need to get a 
stock ROM and use whatever method the stock recovery expects. I know 
that many companies have custom Windows apps for uploading ROMs through 
their stock recoveries; I do not know if they all have different 
protocols, but if there is a canonical protocol I haven't yet found 
documentation and, especially, have not yet found a linux program which 
speaks it (I also have an expensive brick at the moment; I've gotten 
close to being able to fix it by circumventing the recovery, but I'm 
*stuck*: see https://github.com/swetland/omap4boot/issues/8; what kind 
of open source is this??).

I'll want to reemphasize what Khalid said that if you can't find a stock 
ROM either from your sketchy filehost or somewhere else on XDA, try 
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Devices or 
http://omnirom.org/supported-devices/, and please share the results 
because Android is a dark art, partly out of how popular it is (hence 
how much mis- and outdated information spreads) and partly, I think, 
because Google doesn't want to actually invest in making development on 
their devices easy, only development on their OS.