Unable to recover chromebook plus

[Greg]

Hello,

I have been trying to recover my Samsung Chromebook Plus (XE513C24-K01US / kevin d25-a3e-b2a-o8y) from external recovery media, but I am constantly receiving the "An unexpected error has occurred" message during recovery.

After repeating this process several times, I looked through the recovery logs and found the following in recovery_logs/dmesg:

[ 309.442749] rk3399-dmc-freq memory-controller: Got wrong frequency, Request 928000000, Current 4294967295

Which repeats for several thousand lines. Can anyone help here?

[dragon788]

Are you plugged into power when trying to recover or running off battery?

Which port are you using for the recovery device?

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[Greg]

I'm plugged into power and I'm trying to recover from a micro SD card because I don't have a USB-C jump drive.

[dragon788]

I've run into issues recovering from microSD in the past, not sure if it is platform wide or just certain systems. You might see if anybody you know has a USB-C to USB-A adapter that came with their phone that you could borrow in lieu of a USB-C flash drive.

[DennisLfromGA]

Greg,

The reason(s) the recovery attempt failed should be found on the Recovery media itself, here:

 

USB Drive/recovery_logs[date stamp]/recovery.log

~DennyL

[Greg Zynda]

Still no luck using a USB drive from the latest recovery image, and the 115, 114, and 113 images for Kevin at

https://chromiumdash.appspot.com/serving-builds?deviceCategory=ChromeOS

Can anyone replicate on a Chromebook Plus?

[Stephen Baker]

I also can't recover on this device, though for me it also fails to save the log files. VT3 ends with:

echo 'Can'"'"'t store logs on passed device '"'"'/dev/sda1'"'"': not a block device.

return 1

sleep 1d

This is after successfully copying all the partitions, but failing to flashrom from what I can tell of the rapidly scrolling text.

[Stephen Baker]

Using a microsd card instead of a usb stick the recovery process was able to write logs for me.

Full set of logs are attached. The notable error appears to me to be the flashrom failures throughout. There was a -127 error trying to write a tpm parameter in flashrom early in the boot in the VT-3 output that doesn't show up in the log as well, I believe every flashrom execution failed.

[Denny Lockhart]

The recovery.log shows these errors when writing the CROS_EC and the recovery was rolled back:

INFO: write_system_firmware: flashrom -w <IMAGE> -p ec
disable_power_management: Failed to open /run/lock/power_override/flashrom.lock for writing: No such file or directory
FAILED: RO_AT_BOOT is not clear.
EXEC_IN_RAM unsupported.. unconditional jump to RO.
FAILED at 0x00000000! Expected=0xff, Found=0x5e, failed byte count from 0x00000000-0x00000fff: 0xfd2
 ERASE_FAILED
FAILED!
Uh oh. CROS_EC 2nd pass failed.
Your flash chip is in an unknown state.
Please report this to the mailing list at flas...@flashrom.org or
on IRC (see https://www.flashrom.org/Contact for details), thanks!
ERROR: do_update: Failed writing firmware.

>> FAILED: Firmware updater aborted.
1970-01-01T09:52:14.717442Z INFO cros_installer: [inst_util.cc(124)] Finished after 32 seconds.
1970-01-01T09:52:14.717554Z ERROR cros_installer: [inst_util.cc(153)] Failed command: /usr/sbin/chromeos-firmwareupdate --mode=recovery - exit code: 1
1970-01-01T09:52:14.717610Z INFO cros_installer: [chromeos_postinst.cc(256)] Firmware update failed with error code: 1
1970-01-01T09:52:14.717781Z INFO cros_installer: [chromeos_postinst.cc(733)] Rolling back update due to failure calling firmware updater
1970-01-01T09:52:14.727177Z INFO cros_installer: [chromeos_postinst.cc(381)] Successfully updated GPT with all settings to rollback.
1970-01-01T09:52:14.727259Z ERROR cros_installer: [chromeos_postinst.cc(826)] PostInstall Failed.

That may be the issue but I don't what is causing it.

~DennyL

[Stephen E. Baker]

I have never touched the hardware write protect or otherwise tampered with the flash.

I have dual booted Linux and ChromiumOS off USB drives and originally broke ChromeOS by writing to the internal drive from Linux. Since then I re-enabled OS verification from the boot loader so I'm in a bit of a bricked state with restore not working.

Is it possible the unlocking the hardware write would fix this? Or is there any way to alter the recovery script to provide more verbose error output.

[dragon788]

I think at this point you may need an external programmer to rewrite the firmware (which bypasses the software and hardware mechanisms by connecting directly to the isolated chip [but I think you are supposed to disconnect the battery before attempting]) and disabling the write protect on newer devices takes being in developer mode plus disconnecting the battery (or an RMA shim USB instead of a normal recovery image), as disconnecting the battery disables the hardware write protect but you still need a software disable to attempt writing it, though you could try running the recovery with the battery disconnected and see if you get a different result.