iOcean X7S unbricking ideas?

[barefoot]

I'm in a world of n00b pain with my iOcean X7S Elite.

The stock OS is very buggy (watching a video on a webpage would reboot the phone, latest Facebook app version will always crash after about 10 seconds, various other small problems).

I previously managed to get Cyanogenmod running on my Galaxy S2, but I still don't really know what I'm doing.

So, the iOcean.

After a few different failed attempts, I managed to install a new recovery mode. That was the CTR v2.2, which installed itself using PDANet. The PDANet android app allowed me to reboot into recovery mode, which went fine - a nice graphical rainbow coloured thing that worked.

There's something to note - I've managed to soft-reboot into recovery using a few different Android apps, but I still haven't been able to using the power/volume button methods. I can get into a Chinese menu mode by holding volume up/down and power, but that's different to the standard recovery mode I've seen before, and it's certainly not the CTR I have installed. Only CTR by rebooting from the PDANet app.

At this stage, I'm quite well practiced at getting into recovery mode using an app, doing a factory reset and wiping the cache from the standard recovery mode, then having something go wrong, having to reboot the phone and finding a clean phone with no app to get back to recovery mode. Done that a few times. Hence looking for a different recovery mode to try, and finding this CTR and PDANet combination.

Right, so I've rebooted into CTR. I've previously copied a likely looking ROM onto a MicroSD card. It's called X7S-miui_4.4.11_by_fbm.zip . Can't remember where it came from - I did that bit at home, and I'm at work now. Anyway, I used CTR to install that ROM, and the android tools I downloaded to go along with it. Seemed to work fine.

Reboot the phone, and it comes up with a XiaoMi logo (?!). And just sits there. For 10 minutes. I know it takes a while to boot into a new ROM the first time, but that's getting a bit extreme.

And here's my problem - I can't work out how to get a recovery mode other than using an app, and now I don't have a working phone to install an app on.

Help!

Can someone please confirm how to get a recovery mode up, or how to use this strange Chinese menu to do something useful? I don't read Chinese even a little bit.

Is this what we call "soft bricked"? It turns on and does something... just not what it's supposed to... and there's no obvious way to reflash some better software onto it?

tim

[Sniper47]

Yes, you're soft bricked if you can't boot into Android. Solution: find and flash a different ROM with Flash Tools. There are tutorials how to do it in the tutorials section.

[barefoot]

Thanks for the advice :-)

I'm following the tutorial at [Only registered and activated users can see links Click here to register]

First hurdle - install drivers using the PDANet installer.

Problem there is that it needs my phone to be turned on in debugging mode so it can install the right drivers on my PC :lol:

Worst case, I have PDANet installed on my work computer, so I can sit and curse at my softbricked phone for the whole weekend and have another try at fixing it on Monday.

Any other ideas about installing drivers?

[barefoot]

Ooh, that was weird.

I thought I might just try turning the phone on while it was plugged in to the PC with the PDANet installer looking for it.

And then... the phone booted into the new ROM I flashed in to it this afternoon. I guess it just needed a gentle nudge in the right direction :-?

Well, now at least I have a working phone... whether or not I can live with this ROM is to be determined, but I'm unbricked at least :-)

[Sniper47]

Sometimes a phone needs to be booted twice after installing a ROM. Not sure if you tried twice prior to turning it on while plugged into the computer or not, but glad it got worked out.

[barefoot]

Yeah, I tried restarting half a dozen times (pulling the battery to shut down because no buttons did anything). Left it "booting" for over an hour just to see if it would ever come good.

Nothing.

Until it got a digital probe up the USB to ask what drivers it needed, which woke it from its' sleep.

[vampirefo]

Sounds good, make a backup of your working phone so if you get another brick, you have a good backup to fall back to.