Alcatel GoFlip (AT&T Cingular Flip 2) won't boot after flashing a recovery

[Cereal]

So I recently got my Alcatel GoFlip (4044O) and I've been pleasantly surprised with how functional KaiOS is. I decided to look into mods/hacks for the device and found this scene. I read up and got to installing webIDE and a few apps including the adbroot app. My goal was to get whatsapp running on the thing so I followed the steps to backup my partitions and proceeded to replace the recovery with Gerda's recovery... and that's when it happened. Everything was fine after it, the phone rebooted and worked just fine. I powered off and tried going into recovery mode to make sure it worked but it just stayed in a black screen. I left it there for about 15 minutes and nothing showed up so I powered off and back on to just use my phone again, except it wouldn't even show the AT&T boot animation, it would just stay in a black screen. Now I can't do anything with it except enter EDL mode. I tried using the Miracle Box and following the guide in that thread but every time it tried to read the partitions it would just return an error ID 1001. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a way I could flash a stock ROM? Did I miss something important? HELP!!

tl;dr

Flashed gerda recovery, recovery mode doesn't work, phone won't boot pls halp

[Luxferre]

Hi. Let me answer the questions since we now have full control over the situation with 4044O:

1. You must not flash Gerda Recovery on a device originally working on a lower OS version. Architecturally, Alcatel's software and partition layout is a bit different than Nokia's. You should wait until a recovery patched specifically for Alcatel comes out.

2. As with any Qualcomm device, you need three things to restore the partitions in EDL mode: flashing software (QFIL for Windows, qdl for Linux, no working solution found for current Macs - edl.py returns a wrong format), firehose loader and the images themselves.

Here they are:

QFIL for Windows - find it yourself, qdl (for Linux with GCC/clang and libxml2 installed) can be built like this:

git clone https://git.linaro.org/landing-teams/working/qualcomm/qdl.git

cd qdl

make

Firmware images can be found here: https://cloud.disroot.org/s/j4YFjDx99GGFcPx/download 

Firehose can be found here: https://cloud.disroot.org/s/HzxB6YM2wRFPpWT/download - you need the prog_emmc_firehose_8909_alcF.mbn file from that archive.

Don't use the firmware as is right away, since it might reflash your IMEI, and no way to restore it has been found yet (the EFS structure is also different). Instead, open the rawprogram0.xml file for editing (create a backup copy of it before, of course) and then remove all the tags starting with <zeroout and <program except this one:

<program SECTOR_SIZE_IN_BYTES="512" file_sector_offset="0" filename="recovery.img" label="recovery" num_partition_sectors="65536" physical_partition_number="0" size_in_KB="32768" sparse="false" start_byte_hex="0xA0000000" start_sector="5242880"/>

So, this must be the only remaining line in the <data> section in that XML file. It will allow you to only flash the recovery and not touch anything else. Then, feed the file to QFIL or qdl and you should be good.

[Cereal]

Wow that was fast! I'll try this as soon as I can. Thanks for taking the time to help out!

[Luxferre]

Ok, pls try and tell us how it went.

P.S. I had the unbootable situation when fsg partition was rewritten in a wrong way in 4044O several days ago... Had to dig all this out myself.

[Cereal]

Unfortunately this method didn't work. I even tried installing the qualcomm usb drivers to see if that was the issue. If it helps I have the log saved, it should be attached to this post.

The error it gave was '2019-07-20 03:40:51.674    Download Fail:FireHose Fail:FHLoader Fail:The system cannot find the file specified'

:/

[Luxferre]

So, from the log it looks like firehose was passed with no issues. 

As for firmware itself... Don't set patch0.xml. Just use rawprogram0.xml (with only one line in <data> section) and recovery.img, that's it.

[Cereal]

I tried again using only rawprogram0.xml without patxh0.xml but still got the same error :/

[Luxferre]

Try using absolute path to recovery.img in the rawprogram0.xml in that "filename" attribute. I don't know what can go wrong with QFIL because I have no windows. With qdl, it would be just ./qdl [path_to_programmer] [path_to_xml].

[Cereal]

Still no dice. I set everything up on ubuntu but still didn't work. I just gave up and got a replacement. Thanks for helping out though I really appreciate it!