Installation of /e/ ended with corrupted device

Hi,

I’ve just installed /e/ on my new FP4 following all steps described here. Everything went fine until the very last step.
After issuing:

fastboot flashing lock_critical

My FT4 is booting and running /e/ perfectly. But whenever I reboot it, I have a warning that the bootloader is unlocked. Effectively, I did not run the very last step to lock it. If I press ‘power’ again, booting continues normally. Is it safe to use it without locking the bootloader?

If I reboot into the bootloader (pressing volume - and plugging in USB-C) and if I run from my laptop:

fastboot flashing lock

The command finishes successfully but I get a critical message in my FP4 saying that my device is corrupted. Starting /e/ becomes impossible. If I unlock again and re-flash everything I recover /e/.

Any idea of what I did wrong?

If I understand your post correct, you have a working phone right now?

You can use the device perfectly fine with an unlocked bootloader, since I already wrote a summary of the possible downsides earlier today I’ll just link to it here.

While it is possible to exploit an unlocked bootloader, the chances of this happening are slim to none, I and many others are running around with an unlocked bootloader. And since there are quite a few reports of bricking phones after locking the bootloader with yet not exactly known causes, I’d suggest not locking the bootloader for now :slight_smile:

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Yes, my phone is working fine with an unlocked bootloader.
Thanks for your kind answer. I will live unlocked for a while.

3 Likes

@cramik
Please can you cche a few things, to help us understand the actual problems and to see if this happens to you?

  1. Do you have developer options enable?
  2. Do you have enabled “allow OEM unlock” in dev-options?
  3. is this grayed out? Not edittable?
  4. Please reboot in fastboot mode and execute following command: fastboot flashing get_unlock_ability
  5. Do you get back 1 or 0?

Please answer each question. Thanks for your help.

If you’re interested, this is the according bug report for this issue:

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  1. Do you have developer options enable?

I had it enabled in the original Android shipped with FP4. I’ve just checked inside the current /e/ installation. The developer mode was not enabled. To check it, I switched to developer mode. I don’t know how to revert to normal mode. The locking reported earlier was done when the developer mode was not set in /e/.

  1. Do you have enabled “allow OEM unlock” in dev-options?

I allowed it in the original Android before flashing

  1. is this grayed out? Not edittable?

Without doing anything, it is grayed, not editable and it is written: “bootloader already unlocked” or something like that (translated from French).

  1. Please reboot in fastboot mode and execute following command: fastboot flashing get_unlock_ability
  2. Do you get back 1 or 0?
$ fastboot flashing get_unlock_ability
(bootloader) get_unlock_ability: 1
OKAY [  0.001s]
Finished. Total time: 0.001s
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That explains to me why you keep locking and unlocking the bootloader. OEM unlocking is enabled and the flag is still set.
It doesn’t explain to me why you can’t boot the /e/OS when you lock the bootloader.
I can only imagine that the avb key does not match and therefore the OS is not verified.

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Top revert to normal mode just move the slider at the top of the developer options from “on” to “off”. But I don’t see a reason why this should be necessary.

Thanks for the tips. Probably better to revert, if my kids play with the phone without knowing what they are doing.

1 Like

Is it something (avb key) that be probed with fastboot utility?

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