T2e Lost System Files

/e/OS Devices Teracube
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Okay, here’s a story of messing up my phone and discovering strangeness along the way.

My Teracube 2 emerald with /e/OS 1.5-r probably has the best battery life of all of my devices. Good stuff but one day I was doing an 8+ hour idle check. Advanced Privacy was always one of the top battery users even though I don’t use (or need) it. So I decided to see what happens if I disable it which I did using App Manager.

Well, that was a mistake. On reboot the phone would make it to the lock screen, might see a few items load but then it shows a power off dialog and it’s thrown into recovery. Recovery says something is corrupted and suggests a factory reset. Heh, no I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.

Did several reboots and was even quick enough to initiate Safe Mode. Alas, even there it wouldn’t complete boot.

So I figure I’ll try to re-enable AP via adb. Hooked up another phone (Essential PH-1 mata with /e/OS 1.5-q) to the T2e. adb shell and do pm enable foundation.e.advancedprivacy. No go as the pm command cannot be found. Eh?
Checking and I find that neither pm nor am are present in /system/bin/. Those two are shell scripts that call cmd which also does not exist. That’s… not right.
Check on the mata where they exist so I figure I’ll push them to the T2e and see what happens. Didn’t work as now the cmd command cannot find libbinder.so.
Now I start comparing and realize a lot of items are missing/lost/gone from the T2e.
There should be a number of libbinder* libraries on the system. There are none.

Comparing again with the mata as well as crDroid on the OP8T and I see a whole lot is somehow missing. The number of libraries in /system/lib64/ is only a fraction of what should be there (64 items on T2e, 485 on mata). And /system/lib/ is gone altogether.

Having the 1.5 OTA zip available I figure I’ll re-flash it and see if it fixes anything. No change.
The full image zip can’t be flashed via recovery so later on (after some sleep) I’ll see what I can do via the laptop and saving any data, if possible.
Fun stuff. It’s mandatory that I screw up something at least once a year. :grin:

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I am such a dope. Did not realize that what adb sees while in the ROM vs in recovery is different. So nothing was missing in /system.
Disregard. :smirk:

My data was still corrupted in some way so I had no choice but to do a factory reset and start over.
Subdirectories in /sdcard/Android/data/ though were now non-folders so that was odd.
No backups either, at least not on the sdcard. If Neo Backup’s location pointed to its app-owned directory in Android/data then it’s gone. Bummer but that’s okay. Other directories are fine.
A clean start is good plus it’s a tertiary device so nothing important.

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