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[Q] CWM boot problem

Yesterday I went through the process of rooting, unlocking and flashing my GS3. I used CWM to make a backup of my stock rom (which I then saved a copy on my computer) and then flashed to Paranoid Android, which I loved. I used Titanium Backup to load my contacts up, and got prompted with a reboot. Once I did, I kept getting android.process.acore errors, and eventually narrowed it down to Titanium and my contacts (wasn't hard, only thing installed). I decided to flash to stock and backup my contacts to Google, but everytime I enter CWM recovery to restore, it reboots before I have a chance to. Both entering via Rom Manager and into recovery mode. I have used a downloaded stock rom to try and flash back to stock in Odin, and continually get error messages. I would just stick with PA, but every 5 seconds brings up a android.process.acore error because it is still trying to DL my contacts. Anyone have any ideas/hints/tips/etc that I should try?

Nevermind, finally found a stock rom that worked for me.
Update: It turns out it was not a software problem, and had nothing to do with my root, CWM, or PA. After flashing to stock, the problem persisted, even after a full reset and update to 4.1.2. Took the phone to Best Buy, since that is where I have my insurance through. They told me that the power button had gone faulty, which makes sense cause pressing it will prompt power off options, and slightly touching it will lock the phone. According to the guys there, it's a problem they've seen on a few S3's lately. So, I have a refurb on the way via Geek Squad. I jokingly asked for a S4 or One as a refurb replacement, but sadly don't think that'll happen. Anyway, figured i'd update this to let everyone know just in case you encounter the same symptoms.

[Q] Any tips on how to unbrick my phone?

Somehow my phone is bricked, although I still am not sure if it's because I actually did something wrong or it just decided to brick itself out of spite. Here's the rundown of events:
This past August I rooted my phone and installed cm-10.2. I made a backup of the stock rom beforehand (which for some reason is dated from 1970). Since then there have been a bunch of bugs, but nothing super major.
Today I decided to upgrade to cm-11, so I backed up everything important to my PC and used the auto-updater. I got a Status 7 error and the installation didn't complete, and I got stuck in a reboot loop that kept returning me only to the bootloader. I read on another forum that the problem was probably my CWM version (6.0.1.2 instead of 6.0.1.3). Anyway, I tried restoring one of my backups, but the bootloader said the folder was empty and no backups were found. I ended up reinstalling cm-10.2 and gapps from the same zip files I used months ago. This let me properly boot up my phone, but for some reason the google play store still wasn't working. I did a simple reboot and it started working again, so I downloaded rom manager and updated cwm. Rebooted into bootloader, made another rom backup, and tried again to install cm-11. Same error, install aborted. This time, however, my backups magically reappeared (along with an extra mystery backup that had today's timestamp but was ~10 hours in the future), so I restored the original (1970, stock rom). Things boot up fine.
I decide to try installing cm-11 one more time because at this point I assume that if it fails again I can safely restore a backup or at the very least reinstall cm-10.2. It fails again, but this time, when I try restoring any of my cm-10.2 backups I get a DM5 mismatch error and it immediately stops. Restoring 1970 is different, it starts recovering but then halfway through says "error restoring /system" or something like that. So now I'm left with no choice but to reinstall cm-10.2 from the same zip file again. Only this time, booting up only shows the cyanogenmod logo forever. I go back into bootloader and my backups are once again suddenly not recognized. I make a new backup of my broken phone to see if it will make the folder show up. I reboot, and now that new backup is the only one that does show up. Trying to restore gives me a DM5 error. I've now tried reinstalling cm-10.2 several times, but my phone will never get past the cyanogenmod logo. I'm out of ideas for how to get my phone to work.
My questions:
1. Any idea how to unbrick my phone? I have not done any factory resetting because I was worried it would erase my backups and also I don't really see how it would help.
2. Does anyone have a backup image I could use? I don't have mine stored anywhere but on my phone's internal SD, but I could maybe try loading one from my external SD if I had one.
3. What did I do wrong here? From my viewpoint it seems I basically tried the same thing twice and got different results. Is there something I'm missing?
4. If I get a new photon q, how the hell should I go about installing cm-11? I know people have gotten it to work before. Which version are you using?
Thanks for any and all help

I'm guessing you don't have a backup of stock?
Have you tried restoring stock everything using RSD Lite?
Also, how long have you let the phone sit? If the phone requires a 'fsck' (file system check) on you /data partition, you could be waiting for an hour or more at the boot animation.

I do not have any backups stored externally. I'm not familiar with RSD lite, could you explain and/or link? I have only left my phone for about half an hour at the most before hard rebooting it. I'll let it sit for a couple hours and see if it does anything different.

DRH48 said:
I do not have any backups stored externally. I'm not familiar with RSD lite, could you explain and/or link? I have only left my phone for about half an hour at the most before hard rebooting it. I'll let it sit for a couple hours and see if it does anything different.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
See this thread for information on how to restore stock... always a good idea to know how to reset the phone back to a complete stock configuration

[Q] After disabling ATT, hell broke loose.

I have the shield tablet LTE version and after connecting to WIFI it immediately installed all OTAs upto the hotfix also. So here I am sitting with lollipop in my tablet and I decide to go for rooting and CWM installation.. After rooting using adb/fastboot and installing CWM image, I decide to disable ATTall access because I read that it stops the portable hotspot from working. So, did that and then process after process started crashing. First it started with background data not being enabled (playstore wouldn't open) , NVidia hub crashing, google text to speech crashing, etc.
So, I went to cwm and did factory reset. At the initial stages itself where it asks for language setup, the google text to speexh crashes and I cannot click next or proceed forward.
I flash the Lollipop OTA once again thinking it would overwrite the system but it didn't.. and the same issue keeps happening..
Now what do I do?
Regards
Alden

An update to the mess i was in...
I tried recovery mode at the fastloader boot menu and I got the robot lying down with a red exclamation mark sign. I pressed vol + key and it opened the original recovery I think. I wiped user data from this menu and rebooted. and now it has come to the original screen setup and so far no process crashes...
What could have caused this entire mess?

I am not sure what would cause your issues but i believe your best bet is to download the full rom image for your tablet and flash it via fastboot. That should get you back up and running. (Be warned doing this will erase everything on your tablet!! SD card will be untouched)

By fullmrom u mean the one from the nvidia developer website right?

Yes that is the one! I am currently at work so I cant post a link to it but if you need it ill try to post it once im off, in about 30-ish minutes. Good luck! (p.s. last resort is RMA)

Is your shield up and running once again? Just wanted to get an update. =]

Thanks javydawg, I didnt use the one on nvidias developer website as i simply did not have enough data left in my Internet plan .. its 2.3 gb in size... after recoVery i was left with lollipop so i flashed a 750 mb file tht i gt from these forums and updated it to the latest version.. i still haven't pinpointed the reason for my earlier trouble but will shout out if it happens again... have to be careful cos not sure if RMA is possible for me in India...

Phone just crashed and now having problems booting up

So I'm here at work.. working with my phone plugged in, charging, doing it's thing which shouldn't be much when I look over at it there's a bunch of "application x has crashed" and then reboots. Except it only sort of reboots. It sometimes hangs on the reboot, and if I reboot it 3-4 times it might come up into the OS but then all those messages appear again and it'll reboot itself.
I don't think I've installed anything crazy recently and blocked updates a long time ago when I got it, and am rooted with TeamWin recovery on it. I go into recovery and do a fix permissions and permissions and I get a bunch of errors to the effect of "e: xml error parsing file"
I do see that I have a nandroid backup from about 3 months ago that I might just have to try restore, but it's just weird that it seems like the phone just crashed itself. Can anyone think of any options I can try before I do that?
Also I don't think the phone has ever been updated since I got it as I froze/killed that process. Should I try upgrading to the latest? Are there big fixes/security issues that I should be concerned with that would make me want to upgrade?
Thanks for the help.

natboy said:
So I'm here at work.. working with my phone plugged in, charging, doing it's thing which shouldn't be much when I look over at it there's a bunch of "application x has crashed" and then reboots. Except it only sort of reboots. It sometimes hangs on the reboot, and if I reboot it 3-4 times it might come up into the OS but then all those messages appear again and it'll reboot itself.
I don't think I've installed anything crazy recently and blocked updates a long time ago when I got it, and am rooted with TeamWin recovery on it. I go into recovery and do a fix permissions and permissions and I get a bunch of errors to the effect of "e: xml error parsing file"
I do see that I have a nandroid backup from about 3 months ago that I might just have to try restore, but it's just weird that it seems like the phone just crashed itself. Can anyone think of any options I can try before I do that?
Also I don't think the phone has ever been updated since I got it as I froze/killed that process. Should I try upgrading to the latest? Are there big fixes/security issues that I should be concerned with that would make me want to upgrade?
Thanks for the help.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1. What did you do to that x applications? Did you just disable like location in the privacy guard?
2. Well, try to wipe the x application's data in settings -> app menu. If you can't navigate to there, try wipe all your data via recovery
3. Try to dirty flash your rom
4. Change into another rom

After a bunch of reboots, I was able to get the phone up but half my applications were deleted including Google Play store and most other Google apps including Inbox, Gmail, Hangouts. I might be paranoid, but maybe it was a Stagefright virus, but I have no proof that was it.
In the end I restored my nandroid from 4 months ago and it's now stable. But seriously I wasn't touching it when it started and then proceeded to destroy itself. Very strange behavior.

Cant flash Cyanogen, recovery faulty & weird crashes in stock on refurbished Nexus 5

Cant flash Cyanogen, recovery faulty & weird crashes in stock on refurbished Nexus 5
Hey guys,
so I recently got a "refurbished" replacement for my Nexus 5 and I decided since im starting out fresh (can't access the data on the old one), I'll try out Cyanogen mod.
I can assure you that I followed all the instructions exactly. At some point I checked every download for his checksums and all were ok.
Each time I started the process by flashing a factory image (flash-all.bat), to have a clean start.
I also tried to wipe cache/dalvik cache/data afterwards, but not always. This didn't change the behavior.
These things happened to me while trying to accomplish the task, and working around the issues as they arised:
Flashing TWRP: High (3 of 4) chance that TWRP wouldn't even start up, the phone would hang and just flash the TWRP background picture on screen.
When I did get through to TWRP, applying the Cyanogenmod .zip got stuck at "patching system image unconditionally". Let it go on for hours.
I figured that TWRP was broken and tried Clockworkmod instead. CWM at least always started after flashing it. But same as TWRP, it failed in installing the Cyanogenmod .zip. I tried putting it onto the phone by going into the stock android and then through adb push command, but also through sideloading directly into CWM.
What I noticed when going into the stock ROM was, that a lot of Google processes were failing during the initial setup (where it wants to know ur WiFi, date, Google acc, etc), like Maps, Settings, Play Services, and some others. Sometimes they were failing so hard it was impossible to type in the WiFi passphrase because the notifications of different "xxx has stopped working" were coming to fast, sometimes not a single one was failing. I could not find any pattern to this. When they were failing so hard I couldn't get through the initial setup I would just flash the stock again, until I got only some of them failing, or none at all.
Back to CWM and installing the Cyanogenmod .zip:
It failed with different errors. I got status 0, status 1, I think I once got status 6 or 7, but half of the time it hanged exactly where TWRP was hanging. The errors were random. After getting status X, I would sideload it right again, to get other status Y, sideload again, to get the hang. Could not recognize a pattern.
During this I switched USB ports, and cables, and even tried using my laptop instead of the desktop. One of the cables was faulty, it didn't even allow a connection, but any other setup showed the same behaviour.
Is there anything else I can/should try? Is it my fault, or is the phone bad?
Assuming the phone is bad, I suppose I still could get a stock running without the crashes, so it would _feel_ like the phone is alright (which is what Google probably did before sending it out again as "refurbished"), but I think there would be errors in the future, also I don't want a phone with such an uncertainty. Would they swap it? Also, it is a LG-D820, which means it might have issues with european LTE, haven't gotten to trying that out since I don't use LTE right now, nor will I in the near future.
Best regards,
napster

napstr said:
Hey guys,
so I recently got a "refurbished" replacement for my Nexus 5 and I decided since im starting out fresh (can't access the data on the old one), I'll try out Cyanogen mod.
I can assure you that I followed all the instructions exactly. At some point I checked every download for his checksums and all were ok.
Each time I started the process by flashing a factory image (flash-all.bat), to have a clean start.
I also tried to wipe cache/dalvik cache/data afterwards, but not always. This didn't change the behavior.
These things happened to me while trying to accomplish the task, and working around the issues as they arised:
Flashing TWRP: High (3 of 4) chance that TWRP wouldn't even start up, the phone would hang and just flash the TWRP background picture on screen.
When I did get through to TWRP, applying the Cyanogenmod .zip got stuck at "patching system image unconditionally". Let it go on for hours.
I figured that TWRP was broken and tried Clockworkmod instead. CWM at least always started after flashing it. But same as TWRP, it failed in installing the Cyanogenmod .zip. I tried putting it onto the phone by going into the stock android and then through adb push command, but also through sideloading directly into CWM.
What I noticed when going into the stock ROM was, that a lot of Google processes were failing during the initial setup (where it wants to know ur WiFi, date, Google acc, etc), like Maps, Settings, Play Services, and some others. Sometimes they were failing so hard it was impossible to type in the WiFi passphrase because the notifications of different "xxx has stopped working" were coming to fast, sometimes not a single one was failing. I could not find any pattern to this. When they were failing so hard I couldn't get through the initial setup I would just flash the stock again, until I got only some of them failing, or none at all.
Back to CWM and installing the Cyanogenmod .zip:
It failed with different errors. I got status 0, status 1, I think I once got status 6 or 7, but half of the time it hanged exactly where TWRP was hanging. The errors were random. After getting status X, I would sideload it right again, to get other status Y, sideload again, to get the hang. Could not recognize a pattern.
During this I switched USB ports, and cables, and even tried using my laptop instead of the desktop. One of the cables was faulty, it didn't even allow a connection, but any other setup showed the same behaviour.
Is there anything else I can/should try? Is it my fault, or is the phone bad?
Assuming the phone is bad, I suppose I still could get a stock running without the crashes, so it would _feel_ like the phone is alright (which is what Google probably did before sending it out again as "refurbished"), but I think there would be errors in the future, also I don't want a phone with such an uncertainty. Would they swap it? Also, it is a LG-D820, which means it might have issues with european LTE, haven't gotten to trying that out since I don't use LTE right now, nor will I in the near future.
Best regards,
napster
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi.
According to what you say, it seems an hardware problem of you phone. Don't know if it may help but you can try installing an older factory image (for example kitkat) and seeing if the "force closing" problems are still there. If your phone is ok it should be able to run a factory image at least.

Download the nexus root toolkit, create a nandroid backup, then when either in CWM or TWRP wipe everything off the phone then try to flash a ASOP rom like Cataclysm if nothing else works then I don't know how to help sorry-.-

So I tried to get the stock ROM up and running again, and it seems even that is not possible. Several processes keep crashing during various tasks, even when idling. After having a short chat with Google Support about the issues I got an RMA offered, so things are cool. I locked the phone again, set the tamper-bit to false and wiped everything.