How (not) to brick the Android Developer Phone [LWN.net]

How (not) to brick the Android Developer Phone

Posted Feb 18, 2009 21:00 UTC (Wed) by literfizzer (subscriber, #31274)
Parent article: How (not) to brick the Android Developer Phone

Sounds like fun. But is it really necessary to reflash the bootloader when installing a new firmware image? This is usually unnecessary and is the one thing that can really irrevocably brick the phone if it goes wrong.

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How (not) to brick the Android Developer Phone

Posted Feb 19, 2009 3:11 UTC (Thu) by corvus (guest, #82) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not necessary to reflash the bootloader to use a new system image, and, as you suggest, not a good idea. None of the partitions mentioned in the article contain the bootloader, including the potentially confusingly named "boot" partition. Instead it contains what the bootloader (or SPL -- second program loader) boots.

If your phone already has a fastboot compatible SPL (the ADP1 mentioned in the article does), there is no need to change the bootloader, and you can flash newly-built system images, or backups of your old images at will without (much) fear of bricking your phone. When I want to try a new image I've built, I use nandroid to back up my phone in its current state, then fastboot to flash the image, and if it's unsatisfactory, use fastboot to flash by nandroid backups back.

Typically, part of the process of liberating a G1 is to replace the SPL with a fastboot-enabled version.

How (not) to brick the Android Developer Phone

Posted Feb 20, 2009 1:01 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

So you can update the SPL? Does that mean you can brick the machine beyond recovery by any means mentioned in the article by doing that poorly?

How (not) to brick the Android Developer Phone

Posted Jun 26, 2009 8:17 UTC (Fri) by Pinin (guest, #59306) [Link]

Sorry to bump an old thread, but I just can't help to answer this ... YES !
Yes you can brick your ADP1 so badly, but there is a way to recover though.
And I know because I have been there.
I recovered by flashing a DREAIMG.nbh for a comercial T-Mobile G1 and then I had to use the corresponding trick to root the phone, update the SPL again and so on. If anybody knows a better way to solve the problem, I wouldn't mind to know, my ADP is in big danger of having trouble again.