Fairphone

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Accidentally flashed recovery instead of boot

Participate Development
#1

Hi guys,
While rooting my phone, I didn’t pay attention and entered
fastboot flash recovery boot-fairphone-fp2-su-nocrypt-r165.img
instead of
fastboot flash boot boot-fairphone-fp2-su-nocrypt-r165.img

Since I was unable to find any useful, coherent documentation on this stuff* , I’m currently not even sure I broke anything. I don’t want to reboot (still in fastboot mode atm) without having to, since I need recovery to flash a new recovery, yes?

So, can anyone explain how it is with smartphones: Is the recovery image contained in the .img file created by this method, using method 1A, or have I just killed my recovery image (which I suspect, it being an image, after all). Where can I get a stock recovery image to flash over the wrongly flashed one (I noticed none in the downloads support section of this page)? Or is there a method prior to rebooting to undo a flash?

*seriously, I have this problem with smartphones. I use linux a lot, and figured it can’t be that hard to find documentation, but apart from either incredibly technical details (learn all of adb from the reference) or step-by-step directions for special cases I can’t seem to find anything intermediate. Am I looking in the wrong places? For comparison, it’s easy to learn how linux bootloading works in simple steps, beginning with what the partitioning does, but it’s hard to find an explained smartphone partition table, and even harder to find out how to list your own.

#2

Yes, you probably killed your recovery. Unfortunately Fairphone does not provide a stock recovery for now. The only option to get the stock recovery back is to compile FP-OSOS, but that would probably take a lot of time and effort. What I would suggest now is to install TWRP recovery from this threat:


I have the version that @Max_S compiled on my phone right now and it works fine.

It would however also be interesting to know what happens if you have a boot image in your recovery partition… It might just boot your normal OS when trying to enter recovery :stuck_out_tongue:
Fastboot mode should however not be impacted by a destroyed recovery partition. We had one case here in the Forum where a user could not boot his OS, could not enter recovery but could still enter fastboot mode in order to flash back working images…
So far for now. Regards,

Moritz

#3

Thanks for the quick answer!

Yes, after looking into the FPOS compilation thing, I think I’ll avoid compiling 70GB as long as possible. I did do a

adb backup -apk -shared -all

before starting, does this backup anything but the boot partition, so that I can simply play that back? (again, a manpage/cppreference-like description of adb would be nice, but googling “adb manual” does not give anything as in-depth as a mention of the backup option)

Edit: this link suggests adb does not back up enough information to restore the ROMs. too bad

#4

I would also suggest that you simply use the pre-compiled TWRP and following the easy guide there.

It is now tested quite some time and works fine for nearly all (incl. me, while I wrote this guide).

You can then later decide to flash back the original backup, if anybody can provide it (although i doubt you want to switch back, if you once used TWRP…)

Good luck

1 Like
#5

I would also suggest that you simply use the pre-compiled TWRP and following the easy guide there.

This is what I did after I found out the binary was already there :slightly_smiling:
Thanks both of you, I now have a definitely working recovery, and a booting system which probably is rooted, awaiting further playing around!

@Moritz : I was too much of a chicken to test the wrong flash. Perhaps when I’ve got more time, now that I know how to get back, I’ll see how it goes :slight_smile:

1 Like
#6

I understand that perfectly! :smiley:
Good that your phone works again and that it’s rooted as well :slight_smile:

#7

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