Fix for bootloop issues with FP3

/e/OS Devices Fairphone
,
11

I just discovered something!
When booting in recovery mode from the slot with 0.12-q (which has more option than the default LOS recovery mode), I can “Enable ADB”.

With this, my computer detects my device in ‘recovery’:

$ adb devices
List of devices attached
A209G8MN0202	recovery

This would not let me use adb backup (because it requires to unlock the device and accept on a prompt on the screen), but I can enter adb shell and from there, here is what I can see or not:

  • /data, /storage and /sdcard are shown as empty. That was where I guessed first that I could find my data.
  • /dev/block/platform/soc/7824900.sdhci/by-name and /dev/block/by-name are both accessible, and running ls -la in those directories show that the partitions are links to /dev/block/mmcblk0*** in both cases (what’s the difference?).

I was able to adb pull /dev/…/userdata (a huge 49GB file). I could also directly pull everything with mmcblk0.

So, here are my questions:

  • Is it enough to have retrieved userdata if I want to have my data back in place?
  • If not, what should I pull in addition? All mmcklk0, or not? (Since I don’t know how the retrieved file will be structured, I don’t know if I would be able to restore only the partitions that I want. Because restoring the images that are corrupted seems useless)
  • If I can retrieve something like that, how should I proceed to restore it afterwards?
    I’m thinking of somehow following this procedure by @AnotherElk (I will mention this as [1]): reinstalling the /e/ version I had before the update (0.12-p-2020093076095-dev-FP3), but leaving my bootloader unlocked, setting up the same screen lock as before, and then restoring the partitions using TWRP.
    • Does it seem correct to do that?
    • On what slot should I be reinstalling? The one with the update (as in [1]), the other one, or both (as in the documentation link of the original post here)?
    • This does not include /data/media, as said in [1]. Is it possible that there would be something in this directory, if I see /data as empty? Note that I do not have an SD card, and judging from the size of userdata, I should have most of my stuff in the latter.
  • Even better: would it be possible to write the correct boot images to the system using the adb recovery mode? So that I would not need to wipe and reinstall everything :slight_smile:
  • If it is not possible to recover everything with this, do you think of anything else that would do the trick using adb recovery?

Thanks again to all for your help.
I’m confident (or really hoping) that I’m into a solution :sweat_smile: