Bricked my Jolla phone, could it be fixed?

answered 2019-01-22 14:18:00 +0200

DrYak
9624 ●93 ●134 ●128

http://www.sympato.ch/

Regarding the BTRFS :

I would advise having an extra partition on the SD card instead of a loopback on the data partition.

• This way you avoid the extra risk of the main FAT / EXTn partition on the card getting corrupted.
• And if you blkdiscard wipe it after use that's more free blocks in the pool for wear levelling.

I've had such "usage doesn't decrease, even after rebalanceing" situation on a different platform (my Raspberry Pi working as a micro home server) in case of extremely fragmented files (very large torrented files that got a ginormous amount of random writes).

• If that's the case on your Jolla, it would have been better to btrfs fi defrag -v -r any large fragmented file (maybe add something like -t256M for large file to cut into fewer large extents)
• The most likely culprit is .local/share/system/privileged/Contacts/qtcontacts-sqlite/contacts.db acting up (due to the Google Account sync filling it with junk). You can safely delete that SQLite database and resync anew from Google (you'll get a smaller file again). stop and start contactsd.service around your deleteing to have it let go the files.

Regarding your crash :

Saving your home as soon as the symptom appeared is an excellent reflex.

During version --dup missing shared libraries should not be happening (seems that this software takes special care not to have the system in an inconsistent state, that's why it's preferred to zypper dup, etc.), the message you got.

What I think is that your eMMC storage inside the Jolla eventually died :

• the rebalancing + large system update was probably the last straw of "flash writing/erasing" that broke the proverbial camel's back of your ageing eMMC,
• the missing shared libraries were simply the eMMC flash dying: if a checksum fails the BTRFS driver refuses access to the file (you need btrfs restore to fetch corrupted files - that even works to extract files from a partition so corrupted that it doesn't even mount. When you can't rsync,use that instead of trying to fsck, btw).
• eventually the eMMC gave up. The partition table is busted, or the corresponding /dev/mmcblk0p{num} that holds the kernel and the recovery kernel are dead.
• upon boot, as explained in the other sources, the Qualcom chipset's bootloader, isn't able to find any kernel to boot into (not even the recovery one) and goes into a special recover mode (and appears as a modem on the bus).
• In theory, there are proprietary non-free tools from Qualcom that could access the chipset and be used to flash a new firmware.
• But in practice I think the eMMC is dead anyway and there's nothing that could be flashed by the tools.

Short of extremely advanced and costly repairs (soldering a new eMMC storage on the motherboard using a high-end reflow station, then reformat and reflash proper firmware on it), I think the Jolla is definitely bricked.

Another alternative explanation is that something went wrong (subtly corrupted BTRFS partition, that after balancing, lead to a subtly corrupted system, hence the shared libraries errors, and that system somehow failed to flash the new kernel into the dedicated partitions but instead borked the partition table of the eMMC. In which case the soldering of new eMMC isn't required, only the expensive qualcomm reformatting/reflashing proprietary tools. But I find this unlikely to happen without tons of error messages everywhere).

TL;DR: the flash storage of the Jolla died of old age (I suspect).

Fetching a second hand Jolla 1 mother board or migrating to a Sony Xperia X or XA2 device is probably your only hope.