Have a US Cellular Motorola Electrify M - all stock. My understanding is this is the same guts as a RAZR M. Purchased new June 2013 and was originally Jelly Bean.
US Cellular released an official Kit Kat update in February 2015, which was applied shortly after release.
A few weeks ago, I was watching an in-browser video and phone locked up. Had to use power+volume down to reboot
Everything seemed fine for a while, then a week or so ago started having apps crash randomly.
I discovered the internal memory appeared to be full, so cleared out a bunch of stuff. Was still getting app crashes, so backed up the stuff that mattered and attempted to do a factory data reset within "Settings" menu. Calls and texts ALWAYS worked fine, so thought this was likely a data corruption / software issue related to the disk getting full.
Initial boot after reset seemed to go OK, but after entering google account data the screen background started flashing--would show default background momentarily, go black, rinse and repeat about once a second.
Powered down - inserted SD card with the backup files I wanted to restore. Booted up OK, but when tried to open contacts (to restore from the file on the SD card) contacts view would not open. Don't recall exact sequence of events--I got some notifications that gmail had new messages and attempted unsuccessfully to connect wifi, but background eventually started flashing again.
Powered down - tried to power back up... stuck on red M logo animation.
Found some info on accessing fastboot and could get there, but didn't have any options available.
Went to local US Cellular store; salesperson I (eventually) got assigned to supposedly attempted to flash it, but as far as I could tell never got it to connect since it wouldn't boot up.
Doing research later last night I found references to the Android Recovery utility, and was able to get into that. Tried clearing cache partition, then doing full factory data restore from that screen--both yielded no improvement.
Is there anything else worth trying? I have seen some stuff about using AP Fastboot to load back to stock via USB on a RAZR M, and some references to RSDlite... any chance of getting anywhere with those or other external tools?
I'm not unwilling to believe the root of the problem is some sort of hardware failure, but it seems strange that call/text was always fine prior to reset. Suppose it's possible the flash itself is going bad, solder issue on a BGA part, or some sort of a RAM issue that data got corrupted between being read from restore partition and written to active memory space. However, I've done some embedded engineering work and it seems like a decent bootloader should be calculating CRCs throughout the process to prevent corrupt data from being written and throwing errors if something isn't right.
Is there any possibility something is jacked up between the bootloader and installed OS after the KitKat upgrade? I'm fairly ignorant on the inner workings of Android, but have gathered that things go awry in a hurry if different pieces get out of sync.
One of the major obstacles to advanced recovery measures using RSD / Fastboot / etc may be availability of correct stock firmware to flash. From what I've gathered, no stock KitKat ROM has been released publicly or is expected to be. I have seen stock Jelly Bean firmware files--any chance of flashing back to that or do I end up with issues of the bootloader being out of sync with firmware on phone?
Frustrating to go from a operable phone to a brick using the built-in recovery tools that were supposed to fix the problem...
US Cellular released an official Kit Kat update in February 2015, which was applied shortly after release.
A few weeks ago, I was watching an in-browser video and phone locked up. Had to use power+volume down to reboot
Everything seemed fine for a while, then a week or so ago started having apps crash randomly.
I discovered the internal memory appeared to be full, so cleared out a bunch of stuff. Was still getting app crashes, so backed up the stuff that mattered and attempted to do a factory data reset within "Settings" menu. Calls and texts ALWAYS worked fine, so thought this was likely a data corruption / software issue related to the disk getting full.
Initial boot after reset seemed to go OK, but after entering google account data the screen background started flashing--would show default background momentarily, go black, rinse and repeat about once a second.
Powered down - inserted SD card with the backup files I wanted to restore. Booted up OK, but when tried to open contacts (to restore from the file on the SD card) contacts view would not open. Don't recall exact sequence of events--I got some notifications that gmail had new messages and attempted unsuccessfully to connect wifi, but background eventually started flashing again.
Powered down - tried to power back up... stuck on red M logo animation.
Found some info on accessing fastboot and could get there, but didn't have any options available.
Went to local US Cellular store; salesperson I (eventually) got assigned to supposedly attempted to flash it, but as far as I could tell never got it to connect since it wouldn't boot up.
Doing research later last night I found references to the Android Recovery utility, and was able to get into that. Tried clearing cache partition, then doing full factory data restore from that screen--both yielded no improvement.
Is there anything else worth trying? I have seen some stuff about using AP Fastboot to load back to stock via USB on a RAZR M, and some references to RSDlite... any chance of getting anywhere with those or other external tools?
I'm not unwilling to believe the root of the problem is some sort of hardware failure, but it seems strange that call/text was always fine prior to reset. Suppose it's possible the flash itself is going bad, solder issue on a BGA part, or some sort of a RAM issue that data got corrupted between being read from restore partition and written to active memory space. However, I've done some embedded engineering work and it seems like a decent bootloader should be calculating CRCs throughout the process to prevent corrupt data from being written and throwing errors if something isn't right.
Is there any possibility something is jacked up between the bootloader and installed OS after the KitKat upgrade? I'm fairly ignorant on the inner workings of Android, but have gathered that things go awry in a hurry if different pieces get out of sync.
One of the major obstacles to advanced recovery measures using RSD / Fastboot / etc may be availability of correct stock firmware to flash. From what I've gathered, no stock KitKat ROM has been released publicly or is expected to be. I have seen stock Jelly Bean firmware files--any chance of flashing back to that or do I end up with issues of the bootloader being out of sync with firmware on phone?
Frustrating to go from a operable phone to a brick using the built-in recovery tools that were supposed to fix the problem...
