Phone will not flash anything. Technical support

Hardware Hub Phones, Tablets, & Wearables
1

Hi all, I have had no luck fixing my issue on any other forum. Then I remembered this forum. Hope someone out there is smart enough to fix my problem.

I have a Droid turbo and I used Mofo root to get root back on android 4.4.4, used it again to upgrade to 5.1 while keeping root, used sunshine to unlock the bootloader when that came out, and finally installed TWRP recovery on it. I had not done much to it since, but had Intended to install cyanogenmod for a while.

Well I thought I would finally get to it this weekend. I made a nandroid back-up with TWRP, copied it to my computer, backed up some files I didn't want to lose, and went ahead and installed the latest version of cyanogenmod 13 for quark (Moto MAXX and Droid Turbo) and the necessary gapps. It all went very well. I booted into cyanogenmod just fine, and signed in to google.

I was in the process of setting things up, like preferences/wallpapers/wigets etc, while google downloaded my apps. Not long after I started doing this, nova launcher would repeatedly crash, as well as cyanogenmod's built in launcher. I got fed up with it and rebooted. But the phone shut down and started acting odd. It would show what looked like the bootloader, and I had no options at the top. Sometimes it would just say AP Fastboot Flash Mode (Secure) with no other text.

I got it to go to the bootloader after holding down the power and volume down button,(note the bootloader does not quite look normal for some reason) and got it to boot to TWRP. But TWRP said there is no OS installed, and it refused to install anything, wipe anything, and TWRP itself crashed after a bit when I left it there to try and use ADB to push my nandroid back up to it.

Now TWRP will not load from the bootloader, and I cannot flash anything. I wanted to just re-flash the stock firmware. So I downloaded fresh copies of it from the root thread on XDA developers (Cant find it anywhere else), but no matter what, i get the error "(bootloader) Failed to erase partition" It does this for anything. I tried flashing TWRP and the fresh system image. I tried following the steps on the root thread that flash things that you need to prepare the phone for the system image, but all attempts to flash fail with the same message.

Being a Motorola device, I can use mfastboot and adb, and with that I can mfastboot boot "a recovery like twrp". This will allow twrp to boot, but it cant mount any of the storage.

I also tried using mofo to flash a clean system image. (Mofo works by allowing modified official firmware to be flashed without a bootloader unlock) But it just stops and quits at 7%. I have had this problem before, and got around it by using mofo 0.0.2. But I no longer have that version. (0.0.3 is the current version)

One last thing, yesterday the phone randomly decided to boot into cyanogenmod just fine. After about 15 or so minutes of use, it abruptly rebooted and got stuck in a boot loop. I used TWRP manager to install twrp while the phone was working, and it could boot to that just fine. And it mounted everything. But when I tried to backup via my nandroid backup, it failed (possibly due to not having enough space) and the crashed. I'm back to where I was before. Can't flash anything, official or not, and can only get to TWRP via booting it directly with mfastboot boot twrp.iso. And that can't mount any of my storage.

I am at a loss here. I need my phone back ASAP. Any help would be much appreciated.

2

That's kinda spooky. Sounds like it might be a hardware issue. I'd recommend checking out this thread on XDA, though, and determine if it is hardbricked or not first of all, if you haven't already. There seems to be an alternate way to reflash the bootloader there as well, so it might be worth looking into.

3

Thanks for the response, I will look into the thread and the alternate bootloader flashing. I'll report back here.

4

So I think my phone is soft bricked, because my computer recognizes it and fastboot can see it when its connected. What is the alternative method that you see to reflash the bootloader?

5

I was talking about using the TURBO-UNBRICK to get to AP Fastboot flash mode, and then use fastboot from the command line, but that might be the same as mfastboot stuff.

6

I can get to AP Fastboot Flash mode. But both fastboot and mfastboot fail to flash anything.

7

Well that's too bad. If you can get to the menu with the Android laying down (like the one in this thread) you may be able to factory reset or try clearing the cache or something. Other than that I have no clue.

8

I can sort of get there. It used to look like that, but now there is no android on his back, and the options on the top are tiny. The rest is normal.

9

So can you select factory reset with the volume buttons?

10

Yes, but it spits out a bunch of failed messages and then just flashes the android on his back logo Until I hold down the power and volume down buttons. In the end it does nothing.

11

That's weird. I guess it might be a hardware issue, or something like that.

12

I kind of wondered that. Just because it worked, then stopped working again. Just weird that it would coincide with me installing Cyanogenmod. My contract is up in a few months. You might not know, but If I bought another phone, like say the One plus 3, could I just put my sim in that phone?

13

I think it should work, as long as the OP3 supports the right 4G bands, but I'm not sure, so I'd recommend doing some research before.

14

Will do. I'll also keep trying to fix my phone.

15

Sounds like your internal flash storage is broken.

16

Do you think that me installing cyanogenmod and it dying at the same time was just a coincidence?

17

I don't think Cyanogenmod had anything to do with it directly, if that is the case.

It's possible that your storage was on its way out, and flashing a new rom caused so many reads/writes that it finished it off. But that is assuming that the flash chip is indeed bad, which I don't know for certain, just seems that way, with how unreliable things seem to be.

18

Flash storage should last longer unless its just a bad chip right? I have used my phone a lot everyday for almost 2 years, but a normal chip would still be ok, right?

19

Yeah, if it's failed this early it would be because of a bad chip, or a bad trace or something. Im currently using a galaxy s4 thats still holding up. Depends on what chip they used. Maybe we will see a bunch of failing turbos in the near future. Who knows, lol.