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[Q] Booting to black screen but I can still get shell

Brief background: I started with a stock AT&T Captivate, rooted it, then read this: http://samsungcaptivate.wikia.com/wiki/How_To_Enable_Non-Market_apps_for_Captivate. I used Ghost Commander to get the settings.db file, copied it to my Windows machine, ran the SQLite command (and checked that it worked), copied the file back and chmod'ed to 660 (that's read-write for user and group, nothing for world, right?).
Now, I reboot normally, logo comes up, etc., aaaaand... black screen. My buttons are backlit, but nothing on the screen. I can `adb shell` no problem, and I have a backup of the file I modified, but I can't copy it. When I try `su`, it sits for a bit then says "denied", presumably waiting for me to click on the prompt
Right now I'm copying the contents of my SD card (just to be safe) using `adb pull` -- the irony is, I'm doing all this so I can test restoring from the Titanium Backup I just made last night!
At any rate, I'd rather stay on a stock ROM (at least for now) -- I don't have a ton of time to spend on it -- but any fix would be appreciated.
ETA: Answered my own question -- a factory reset did it, and luckily I had a Titanium Backup of everything from last night. Still curious what I could have done to salvage things had I not had the backup...

Odin one-clock to JF6 would also set it back to stock

Device isn't working properly after wiping...

So I have a problem with my Nexus 5. Yesterday I tried all kinds of different Lollipop roms and at the end of the day I sticked to Cataclysm. I liked it and my phone was all set up but I noticed there were a lot of unnecessary folders on my internal storage and a nested 0 folder (0 inside /0). I didn't like that so I thought about making a nandroid backup, storing it on my computer (together with my music etc.), wiping everything and restoring it by using TWRP and then eventually putting my music back.
So after I stored a backup on my computer, I started my device into recovery mode and chose the option 'advanced wipe'. Usually I would do a lot of research for everything I do but in this case I was a bit lazy to do that, I tried digging into the search results of Google concerning wiping but I gave up after some unsatisfying results. So I checked every box in the list, including data and system and went through with the wiping. So because my storage was completely wiped I didn't have a 'WRTP/BACKUPS' folder anymore. I made a backup from the stuff I had (which was only a few mb's) so I would have that folder again (otherwise I wouldn't be possible to locate my nandroid backup). I wanted to transfer my nandroid from my computer to my phone by connecting it through USB but for some reason the Nexus 5 didn't show up on my PC when it was booted in recovery (this sometimes happens for some reason)
I managed to do it by using 'adb push Cataclysm folder' in cmd. I went into recovery and restored my backup. My phone booted and I thought everything was as it should be. The wallpaper was black but that was logical because my internal storage was wiped, including my custom wallpaper. But then I noticed something strange, my status bar disappeared, sames goes for my navigation bar. I really have no idea what happened because I've restored nandroid backups before and everything went fine.
So then I put a clean version of Cataclysm on my phone and for some reason it asks me to insert a SIM-card into my device while it has one. I skipped that step and then it asked for my home Wi-Fi and I chose mine, then it checked the connection way longer than it would normally do. After I was done with all the steps my homepage entered my screen and guess what, my status bar and also my navigation bar were absent. It was like my cell phone was in immersive mode all the time. Then I tried flashing the KitKat factory image by going into recovery with my phone and opening 'flash-all.bat' on my PC but then it said '< waiting for devices >' while I enabled USB debugging... I opened cmd and typed 'adb decives' and mine showed up, so it was connected (although it now says 'unauthorized' when my phone is normally booted).
Then I flashed clean Cataclysm again and it again said I had to insert my SIM-card and it then again checked the connection with the Wi-Fi for a couple of minutes. When I was done with the installation I tried replacing the wallpaper with one from Lollipop but it didn't work although there was a preview available. There was again no status bar and navigation bar. I then opened chrome and went to this website and now I'm typing this on my Nexus 5 which has a permanent immersive mode now.
So I don't have much in my internal storage anymore, only a TWRP folder with backups, nothing more, not even a 0 folder if I'm not wrong. There's something wrong with my mobile connection and definitely something going on with my navigation bar and status bar. I hope anyone could help me with this because this is really frustrating becausr I tried to fix it for the last couple of hours, unfortunately without any result...
EDIT: I forgot to mention that when I was trying to figure out how to send the nandroid without being able to access my internal storage via my computer, I booted in recovery, went to 'advanced' and then to 'adb sideload' and tried that because I saw it somewhere on the internet. I somehow believe this contributed to the problem I have.
EDIT2: Now, when I try to power off my phone by holding the power button, it reboots the device instead, what's going on... And as I said, I have a black screen as wallpaper for some reason and I can't change this, but if I open my weather widget, the widget window shows up with my chosen wallpaper on the background, what kind of sorcery is this?
EDIT3: I wanted to download a terminal emulator from Google Play to do this but I couldn't get to 100% so I thought there was something wrong with the app on my device. I googled the apk and I wanted to download it from Zippyshare and when I clicked on the button 'download now', the phone showed the message 'no SD card', so I guess that's the culprit of all of this?
TL;DR My phone is acting really weird (no status or navigation bar, phone reboots instead of asking whether I want to have it shut down when I hold the power button, the wallpaper being strange, SIM-card isn't being recognised) after I wiped data and system and actually everything...

Reboot to bootmanager , flash a factory image , wipe , start over . Something must have gotten corrupted in your nandroid backup.
Regarding ADB not working , you also need to authorize the pc you are working from . You will get a prompt on your phone when connecting . If you dont , go to developer setting , wipe ADB credentials , reconnect the phone.
Also , adb push works fine for single files but it sometimes borks when you are pushing big/many files.
Edit : I hope you didn't wipe EFS as well ( though AFAIK TWRP doesn't wipe it on a advanced wipe) . If you did it's time to return it to stock and send it to LG/Google

Niflheimer said:
Reboot to bootmanager , flash a factory image , wipe , start over . Something must have gotten corrupted in your nandroid backup.
Regarding ADB not working , you also need to authorize the pc you are working from . You will get a prompt on your phone when connecting . If you dont , go to developer setting , wipe ADB credentials , reconnect the phone.
Also , adb push works fine for single files but it sometimes borks when you are pushing big/many files.
Edit : I hope you didn't wipe EFS as well ( though AFAIK TWRP doesn't wipe it on a advanced wipe) . If you did it's time to return it to stock and send it to LG/Google
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for reading my huge explanation. After hours of searching and trying a lot of things with my device I figured out how to fix it. Do you remember I said that when I tried to flash the factory image with 'flash-all.bat' that it responded with '< waiting for devices >' ? Well, after reinstalling the drivers countless times and trying to find the culprit I realised I was trying to flash it with TWRP being open, and not the bootloader... So after I was aware of that I finally managed to put stock Lollipop on my phone, then I wiped everything and flashed Cataclysm. It felt pretty satisfying to have a working phone again, it's a pity I had to start from scratch but on the other side, I now how a phone without any rubbish.
Regarding adb push, if I would like to ever push a rom or a big file onto my phone in case I would ever have a similar annoyance, what do you recommend me to do it with?
And what is EFS exactly and what happens if I would ever wipe that? Thank in advance!

Regarding ADB push / twrp MTP mode you jst need to remember not to try and upload the entire content of a sdcard backup or > 3-4 gigs. Big files rarely missbehave , but I screwed up my SD permissions when trying to restore my sdcard ( thousands of files and about 14 gb total).
EFS is a secure partition that stores your GSM/network id and profile - IMEI and so on. AFAIK it's pretty hard to erase but it is possible if you play around with format/repartition commands. Just follow the guides and instructions on this forum and it should be fine.
Corrupted or erased EFS = no network connectivity besides WiFi . And since tampering with it is illegal in some countries the only way to fix it is by RMA/warranty.
I'm glad you've fixed it - I'm not surprised it was a simple mistake , I've been there myself ( tried for an hour to flash a factory image unsuccessfully only to realize I had my phone plugged in a USB3 socket ) .
Don't forget to make a nandroid now that you are set up with your fav. ROM - it will come in handy sometime.

Niflheimer said:
Regarding ADB push / twrp MTP mode you jst need to remember not to try and upload the entire content of a sdcard backup or > 3-4 gigs. Big files rarely missbehave , but I screwed up my SD permissions when trying to restore my sdcard ( thousands of files and about 14 gb total).
EFS is a secure partition that stores your GSM/network id and profile - IMEI and so on. AFAIK it's pretty hard to erase but it is possible if you play around with format/repartition commands. Just follow the guides and instructions on this forum and it should be fine.
Corrupted or erased EFS = no network connectivity besides WiFi . And since tampering with it is illegal in some countries the only way to fix it is by RMA/warranty.
I'm glad you've fixed it - I'm not surprised it was a simple mistake , I've been there myself ( tried for an hour to flash a factory image unsuccessfully only to realize I had my phone plugged in a USB3 socket ) .
Don't forget to make a nandroid now that you are set up with your fav. ROM - it will come in handy sometime.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll definitely make a nandroid, just in case. Thanks for the help and the clarification!

Try wiping your bum more thoroughly

Trouble installing stock ROM due to multiple '0' folders !HELP!

I am having a lot of trouble restoring my GSM Galaxy Nexus to it's former glory. I installed CM12 and CWM recovery earlier but CM12 suddenly stopped working. My phone started rebooting over and over so I decided it was to time to flash the stock ROM. I flashed the stock ROM with WugFresh's root toolkit. And it worked fine besides the fact that writing the system.img took 30 mins, which is very unusual. I rebooted my device and CM12 showed up again... ?!. I tried flashing it by hand with ADB but no luck either. CM12 was still there. I've been busy 3 days now and suddenly realised that CM12 created new root folders after a factory reset which I did multiple times. So for example, my sdcard contains one root with a folder, named "0", that contains the files om my phone before the factory reset. The problem is that this folders contains the system and CM12 ROM too. So I have like four '0' folders, and the 'deepest' one contains the system and ROM. Assuming that if you flash a stock ROM, it will install in the root of my SD-card, but doesn't boot because it didn't overwrite the CM12 ROM in the deepest '0' directory [​IMG]. If only CM12 was working, I could manualy delete all the unneccesary '0' folders... I really have no idea how to continue from now on and I really need your help :fingers-crossed:
Edit: I tried: adb shell rm -r /sdcard/0 and it is gone but if I reboot Recovery and look into my folders everything is there again...
epilogue:
- Maybe the fact that sytem.img took 30 minutes to write has something to do with all those '0' folders [​IMG]
- I tried flashing multiple recovery's to my device but they only show up if I open them via ADB. Ohterwise CWMR shows up again because that one is actually installed in the 'correct' (read:incorrect) folder.
- With Skipsoft roolkit I actually received an error while writing userdata.img. It said: remote: write fail. I thought this was due the multiple installation folders and the toolkit not knowing where to place/flash the rom.
So I need to remove all the 0 folders and place the OS back in the sdcard's root, or I have to somehow tell android to place the stock rom in the same directory as CM12, or I need to somehow wipe the complete sdcard so I can install a new recovery and flash the stock rom... I have no idea how however.
Thanks in advance!:good:

Issue of folder and file dates with TWRP Restore

Dear friends,
I am facing an issue and have spend 3-4 days searching in xda and elsewhere to figure out a solution but was unable to.
I have a TWRP backup of Yuphoria phone that I moved to PC (after doing a tar using "tar -pcvzf /sdcard/aa.tar.gz /sdcard/TWRP/BACKUPS/****/1970-*****"). Later I moved the aa.tar.gz back to the TWRP and untarred it.
I was able to use TWRP and do restore. The phone booted back fine.
Whatsapp was showing error asking me to check the dates etc.
I reinstalled whatsapp with fresher version than the backup and it said done (and it popped up Xprivacy as expected). I rebooted the phone and it stayed put in the Cyanogen logo for a looong time (perhaps it was doing some operations ?) and showed the lock screen. The phone didn't respond upon showing the lock screen and rebooted to the logo again (I am waiting for it to finish rebooting).
I then went to /data/data and saw that here and elsewhere the files and folders have a date with the year 1970 !
I know that TWRP can't make backups indicating the date the backup is made. But I didn't expect that that backup itself couldn't save the dates of the folders and files !!
Can anyone please help how to use my old backup successfully with the phone ?
Would changing the date (based on the date of the TWRP backup created - I noted down separately which backup corresponds to what date) of all the folders and files help ? I did tried that on /data/data and another system folder (forgot which one) but phone caught some other issue with it.
Or could the problem be unrelated to date altogether ?
PLEASE HELP WITH THIS !
Thanks so much for reading !

How to debug data related bootloop?

begonia (Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro), MIUI 11.0.6.0
I had an unfortunate series of events that resulted in a booloop. Basically:
- Magisk suddenly stopped working one day, after 1.5 year of no issues. I did nothing related to it recently, except just using root functionalities in e.g. Tasker
- I flashed newer Magik 23 and also updated TWRP fom 3.3.1 to 3.5.2
- everything worked fine up until one restart, which resulted in TWRP encryption problems. Right before restart I'm pretty sure I installed Viper4android. I could still get into system with a workaround of TWRP's "Decrypt user" hanging into button reboot, but Magisk/root wasn't working anymore
- so I thought reflashing Magisk and dm-verity/forceencrypt would help, but here's where the bootloops started. During the flash attempts I saw some partition mounting errors since the device was decrypted, so maybe that caused some data issues?
I tried now:
- downgrading TWRP to 3.3.1 - decryption works fine in it and I can flash problemlessly from it, however, doesn't help with bootloop. Reflashing Magisk/dm-verity zips from it also didn't help
- flashing recovery ROM (the same MIUI I had - 11.0.6.0) changed nothing
- flashing fastboot ROM in MiFlash with "save user data" option changed nothing, except I guess confirming the issue is with data
- last thing I tried was flashing uninstall.zip for Magisk since that removed its data folders, which I thought may have got corruped, also to no avail
I know it would probably get fixed with data wipe, but I need the data - I have hundreds of apps with lots of configuration for permissions, notiications, etc. and my recent backups from few months ago vanished because SD card got lost. I have a TWRP 3.3.1 backup of the data now, too bad I didn't do it before updating Magisk/TWRP - lesson learned... So the question is - what can I still do to further debug and fix this without losing data?
I read that reading these logs may also help with debugging, but not sure what to look for.
Kernel log (/proc/lastkmsg): https://pastebin.com/T2xBBRvi - some error looking lines at the end, but non-comprehensible. Can I use them somehow futher?
dmesg log: https://ghostbin.com/paste/vyBDk - don't really see anything here, but it's quite long and not sure what to look for
logcat: https://ghostbin.com/paste/PSh7f - lots of "avc" errors
Please help

Bump. Any help would be appreciated

Plug in the USB cable with the phone powered off. Then issue the commands
Code:
adb devices
adb wait-for-device
adb logcat
from your Windows CMD or Linux terminal: it will hang waiting for the device to come on-line, now power up the phone. The logcat should start scrolling off then.

While it's turned off:
Code:
$ adb devices
List of devices attached
mfaajbdu5s79pfhy unauthorized
If you `adb wait-for-device`, the cmd just waits and you can't enter next command.
`adb logcat`, if I skip the above, waits for device itself, but nothing happens, it just restarts to TWRP and the commands still hang. I can use logcat while in recovery though, that's what I did above

Ok, so I just went ahead and tried the following, too:
- made sure the TWRP data backup can get restored, just in case
- wiped data through TWRP, still the same (re)bootloop into TWRP. I tried both factory reset and advanced wipe with Dalvik/Data/ntenal Storage/Cache.
- so I tried reflashing 11.0.6.0 using MiFlash with that erasing data. That at least worked and phone boots after doing this, but unfotunately not what I'm looking it
- I then tried to get TWRP 3.3.1 back. I got into that and the usual rooting steps were invalid - recovery_fromboot ile was not present in system_root/system. Maybe that's not just present in downloadable ROMs? No clue, but doing the rest of required rooting steps - Magisk 23 install -> Close AVB (TWRP action) -> Remove dmverity (TWRP action) resulted this time in infinite type of bootloop, not sure why, waited for over 30 minutes
- so I reset into TWRP and tried flashing the dmverity zip that's from xda. And this is definitely what caused previous (re)bootloop as after flashing that its more or less the same time length before boot stops and restarts into TWRP. Now, weirdly, while installing this there was an error this time, saying that nvdata cannot be mounted
So I guess the problem before was with mounting nvdata? I see it's something related to phone's IMEI. How does it work exactly, is it somehow related to /data partition? Why wouldn't it mount? Why does it work with pure standard flashed ROM? Is it supposed to be empty when you look at it with TWRP's file manager? Could be something else but this is my only clue right now...
EDIT: oh, you can mount it in TWRP and that works fine, it's not empty. Not sure why that install scipt suddenly stated claiming it can't be mounted, by the end of log, though.

Completely no insights?

I'm coming back to the topic after almost 1 year on old backup phone because I got depressed by this incident and couldn't continue working on it. The old one is like 6 years old, it has abysmal battery life, it ran out of space and I can't install certain apps on older Android, I'm also missing a lot of the set up that I had and which was pretty convoluted - with Tasker and lots of other heavily configured apps. Which slows me down each day.
I can bring the new phone into usable state anytime, a matter of less than hour and reflashing the soft completely, however, setting it up initially took me one year of almost daily changes, many of which can't be retraced as my Titanium backup is old for some reason and there were a bunch of root related changes.
So any sort of help as to how I could potentially recover it with the data would be really appreciated.

And bump

Let's try a bump again

And one more hopeful bump. I'm even willing to pay/donate for any useful insight that will lead to progress with this as my old backup phone is becoming unusable and I don't want to start setting up this one from scratch again.

One last bump before trying in a new topic.
TLDR: what's the best way to debug a bootloop? Do the logs above help or is there something else?

Destroy666x said:
I'm coming back to the topic after almost 1 year on old backup phone because I got depressed by this incident and couldn't continue working on it. The old one is like 6 years old, it has abysmal battery life, it ran out of space and I can't install certain apps on older Android, I'm also missing a lot of the set up that I had and which was pretty convoluted - with Tasker and lots of other heavily configured apps. Which slows me down each day.
I can bring the new phone into usable state anytime, a matter of less than hour and reflashing the soft completely, however, setting it up initially took me one year of almost daily changes, many of which can't be retraced as my Titanium backup is old for some reason and there were a bunch of root related changes.
So any sort of help as to how I could potentially recover it with the data would be really appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Titanium backup is now broken, at least the recovery is now broken. You also are not allowed to start duplicate threads.

Titanium backup doesn't really help me anyways. And ok, I guess I'll keep bumping it then...

Can you access fastboot?