OK, the titles doesn’t allow a very long description so here’s the deal:
I installed the Open OS 16.05
I decided to do a ‘clean slate’, so I booted into TWRP and formatted it - foolishly thinking that this wipes cache/data/dalvik
Now I have no OS on my phone, and can only boot into TWRP
This is novel. I’ve rooted every Android phone I’ve ever owned, from the HTC Hero, and I’ve never been able to wipe the OS without intentionally overwriting it with another OS. Anyways…
I figured I’d used TWRP to flash the OS back onto my phone, but that doesn’t work. I tried it these ways:
Flash the OTA version using TWRP
Flash the OTA version using adb sideload
Flash the non-OTA version using TWRP
Flash the non-OTA version using adb sideload
They all fail, with no decent debug-level output. I can’t boot into the fastboot (which is the documented way to flash the OS). So I’m stuck with TWRP and adb sideload, neither of which will flash the OS onto the phone.
It’s awkward that you can’t get into fastboot (Also not using {power + vol. down} ?), which would have been my first recommendation to the flash the system again.
You could now try to download the zip file of the osos image and unzip it. Then only flash the boot, system, and userdata images.
I guess flashing the whole system file will not work because it would overwrite the recovery as well. With the described way you could bypass this.
Wait a minute… Damn it, people, fastboot should make it look like the phone is doing something other than ‘hanging on boot’. I’m leaving this post here in case someone else thinks that they’re stuck.
