Weird SD card/boot loop issue

[EbE404]

OK, all

I just ran into a weird one. I think I got it solved, but I'm looking for thoughts on what happened so I can learn and keep an eye open in the future. Here's the run down.

• I rooted for the first time from V2.1 a couple of weeks ago using SPRecovery to flash Bugless Beast V1.1
• I'm using Sweeter Home, the most recent build, as my home replacement (Love it, BTW)
• Wanted to check out ROM Manager to see how well it ran.
• Weirdness

So, here's the saga. Last night I installed Titanium and ran a backup. I also have Astro, but figured I'd give Titanium a try, as it would also keep the settings. After running the backup, I rebooted and installed ROM Manager.

Tonight, I was poking around and wanted to create a ROM backup using RM, so I flashed CW Recovery from RM and let it do its thing. No problems.

After it was done and rebooted, I opened RM and set about creating a Nandroid backup. Things seemed to go OK, but toward the end, it raced through a bunch of things too quickly for me to completely follow and rebooted. Now the weirdness begins.

The phone rebooted, came up with the Droid logo and the eye, vibrated as if it was trying to mount the SD card, paused then rebooted again. It went through this sequence three times and eventually came up to my unlock pattern. So, I unlocked, opened RM, and got a message about the SD card not being mounted.

I opened Astro, and sure enough, it couldn't find the SD card either. So, I rebooted into CW Recovery, but it could see the card just fine. Rebooted normally-no SD.

Tried to mount it via USB-no SD. Rebooted into recovery, the SD was there.

So, I began to try a few things, fixed permissions in ROM Manager and wiped the cache to see if something in there was stuck, and rebooted again. Same boot loop sequence, then the phone came up, but now it gets even weirder.

The phone reboots after a few seconds. Now, I get stuck in a sequence where the phone reboots, goes through the loop, comes up for a few seconds, then reboots again.

So, I keep an eye on what's happening, and it seems that part of the booting sequence is Sweeter Home "Synchronizing Application Tags", where I believe it is trying to write to the SD card, failing to find it and somehow triggering the reboot.

Battery pulls and SD card pulls didn't change any of this, so I manually rebooted into recovery and was lucky enough to still have the update.zip file from BB1.1 on the SD card, so I manually reloaded that ROM, and all was well-SD card showed up all the files were there, no boot loop-all good.

Ran the Titanium restore, and sure enough, everything was there along with the settings, so I'm feeling pretty good about that, and the phone works.

So, my guess is that something with the RM backup hosed the SD card, or at least the phone's ability to read it, but not a total corruption since all my files were there and the Titanium restore ran fine.

So...anybody ever run into anything like this before, or have any ideas on what might have gone down there?

 

[mwhartman]

Wow quite a journey. When Rom Manager was first released there seemed to be lots of issues. Then, things settled down and folks reported good things with RM. Now, however, it seems that folks are experiencing issues again.

I installed RM so that I could help others but I keep the alternate recovery (SPRecovery) flashed. It has never left me down so I'm more comfortable with SPR. After your experience perhaps you may want to use RM and flash SPR.

Glad you were able to restore an old backup.

Mike

 

[EbE404]

Thanks for the comments, Mike.

Before I even bothered installing RM, I spent a few hours last night reading up on it and how CW Recovery stacked up against SPRecovery. Most of the comments seemed to bear out what you are describing, but I figured I'd give it a try anyway to see how it ran for myself. Fortunately, RM does have the option to flash the alternate recovery, which is a great thing.

Is it possible to use the RM GUI with SPRecovery? When I launched it, it was fairly insistent that it needed CW Recovery to use RM.

On the plus side of the whole adventure, I now know that Titanium works quite well and will pony up for the paid version, and there's a small bit of victory in saving the phone from its "death spiral", but I'm still really interested to figure out exactly what happened-not to point fingers at any devs or apps, but just so I know what caused the mess and maybe get ideas about how to avoid it.

 

[mwhartman]

We are certainly on the same page re RM and CW. The only time I flash CW is when the market notifies me of a new release.

I do not think you can use the RM UI with SPR. My sense is that after using SPR a few times you will become very comfortable with it.

I've use Titanium and My Backup Pro. Both are excellent apps and well worth the few dollars.

I wish I had a suggestion on what may have caused your problem.

Mike