[SOLVED]Fairphone First Edition Bricked

Hi team,

I upgraded my Fairphone to 1.6 today and did the repartitioning. In an attempt (yes, I was stupid but wanted to flash custom system.img builds) to reach the fastboot mode promised here I downloaded the images package and manually flashed recovery.img and boot.img to /dev/recovery and /dev/bootimg respectively. And it totally screwed the partitioning scheme. ADB sideloading the 1.6 or the partition update zip fails with Error: Invalid partition setting 15: ebr2 3d80000:3d00000 on the phone’s screen. I am completely helpless, can’t get a logcat or any other useful information. But I really need my phone. Is there any way you can help me? Thanks in advance!

This may be of help from the XDA forum to reflash the binaries onto your phone.

This was also discussed in this topic and this, so you are not alone if you need support doing this.

If all else fails, you may need to contact Fairphone support directly

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Many thanks.
I got access to a PC running Windows today. After tons of Windows-ugliness I got SP Flash tool running. For anyone experiencing a similar situation: It wouldn’t let me flash until I chose “Format + Download All”. As a bonus, I can also get into fastboot mode now. I guess it’s part of a non-OTA image, probably updated U-Boot package. However it seems fastboot is also restricted because it will only let me flash official images.

Hi @koneu ,

I am not aware of any limitations in fastboot what are you trying to achieve?

Hi @keesj,
I am trying something along make systemimage; fastboot flash system out/target/product/system.img. It doesn’t work. The phone complains about lost USB connection after downloading for a few seconds and tells me to re-plug the cable. Flashing a custom boot.img works fine, so I am propably just missing some MTK-specific header (can’t find any in factory images though). Should I try flash:raw with a non-sparse image?

Hi

@koneu, I am not sure how to do this so you will have to figure it out. I documented the process for the kernel on github and It might contain some hints on how to do things. Trying the raw image is probably a good idea.

For converting between sparse and full images you need the simg2img and img2simg tools that can be found in system/core/libsparce of an Android AOSP checkout. The normal way to create the flashable images is by building the otapackage target so that one will contain a properly formatted .img file.