fastboot -w not working

[Joshua Brindle]

I have 1 device, out of 8, that refuses to wipe with fastboot -w:

$ fastboot -w
Creating filesystem with parameters:
Size: 15961423872
Block size: 4096
Blocks per group: 32768
Inodes per group: 8192
Inode size: 256
Journal blocks: 32768
Label:
Blocks: 3896832
Block groups: 119
Reserved block group size: 951
Created filesystem with 11/974848 inodes and 103467/3896832 blocks
erasing 'userdata'...
OKAY [ 0.007s]
formatting 'userdata' partition...
sending 'userdata' (137971 KB)...
writing 'userdata'...
FAILED (remote: Write Fail)
finished. total time: 37.268s


If I go into CWM recovery I can adb shell and mke2fs successfully, is
this a faulty phone or is fastboot broken somehow?

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

This could be dead hardware (i.e. a dead flash chip).

Do you have two devices expected to be identical where one succeeds
and one fails? If you do, can you run "fastboot getvar
partition-size:userdata" on both?

Also, you can try to just "fastboot erase userdata" and either let
Android write a clean filesystem at first boot or go into recovery and
do a factory reset from there.

JBQ

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Jean-Baptiste M. "JBQ" Queru
Technical Lead, Android Open Source Project, Google.

Questions sent directly to me that have no reason for being private
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[Joshua Brindle]

Jean-Baptiste Queru wrote:
> This could be dead hardware (i.e. a dead flash chip).
>
> Do you have two devices expected to be identical where one succeeds
> and one fails? If you do, can you run "fastboot getvar
> partition-size:userdata" on both?
>

Working phone:
$ fastboot getvar partition-size:userdata
partition-size:userdata: 0x00000003629fbc00

Non-working phone:
$ fastboot getvar partition-size:userdata
partition-size:userdata: 0x00000003b7600000

> Also, you can try to just "fastboot erase userdata" and either let
> Android write a clean filesystem at first boot or go into recovery and
> do a factory reset from there.

Doesn't look like fastboot erase userdata did anything, there is still
data on there.

$ fastboot erase userdata

erasing 'userdata'...
OKAY [ 0.007s]

finished. total time: 0.007s

and then reboot and everything is still there.

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

I'm not a deep expert those areas, but it seems to me that the
bootloader is very confused about its partition table: both the fact
that it's not returning the proper size and the fact that it's not
able to erase the target partition properly point in that direction.
Unfortunately, that tends to be a question straight for the OEM, as
all of that stuff is their proprietary code.

JBQ

[Joshua Brindle]

Jean-Baptiste Queru wrote:
> I'm not a deep expert those areas, but it seems to me that the
> bootloader is very confused about its partition table: both the fact
> that it's not returning the proper size and the fact that it's not
> able to erase the target partition properly point in that direction.
> Unfortunately, that tends to be a question straight for the OEM, as
> all of that stuff is their proprietary code.
>

Should I try to RMA the phone? I bought it straight from Google.

[Jean-Baptiste Queru]

That's potentially an option, but I don't know the exact process and I
can't promise any results.

JBQ