[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] art.deco:
My road to success on A789

Thanks very much to Cybermaus for the TWRP recovery and the rebuilt A789 ROM.

I'll relate my experience here as a complete newbie to this world. I'd never even owned a smartphone before....

I bought a Lenovo A789 to use primarily as a GPS from (Hong Kong-based?) Merimobiles via Amazon. Deals were a little better on Etotalk, but their payment options were complicated, and I wanted to be paying with credit card so I had recourse if there were any problem.

It came rooted and with a working recovery install, thankfully. Unfortunately, the GPS didn't work, as has been much noted here. Searching around for a fix brought me to this thread.

It took me a week or so of fiddling around to figure out what to do, trying to understand about scatter files and such, and trying to get things like Helium backup to work, most of which was not really necessary. I tried just installing the location fix that's been posted, but I clearly did something wrong because that still didn't get the GPS working for me. So I did the full ROM. The simplified story is:

1. Bought and installed an SD card.

2. Installed Mobile Uncle from the Google Play store, mostly because it provides a more reliable way to boot into recovery than trying to hit the buttons with the right timing.

3. Connected the phone to a Windows 7 machine. (I think I could have done it all from Linux, but I thought I had to run the flash tool, which is written for Windows.)

4. Swiped down from the top to get the menu to connect by USB. I had messed with trying to install drivers on Windows, but I don't think any of this was necessary.

5. Downloaded the TWRP recovery image in Windows. I wanted this because the recovery that came installed on my A789 was all in Chinese, which I don't know, and I didn't feel very confident that I was doing the right things.

6. Renamed the recovery as update.zip, because that seemed to be the only file name the existing recovery could handle.

7. Copied the update.zip to the SD card.

8. From Mobile Uncle, rebooted into recovery mode.

9. In the (Chinese) recovery, selected the menu item with "SD" in it, and then the one with "update.zip" in it. This successfully installed the TWRP recovery. Selected the last menu item, which I figured had to be "quit" or "reboot", which was correct.

10. In Windows, downloaded the current ROM, which at that time that I'm writing this is A789_ROW_S106_cybermaus_ICS_V3.21. I didn't have to rename it since TWRP allows installation from any file name. Copied it to the SD card.

11. Booted normally, and then from Mobile Uncle again booted into recovery. This time it was running the TWRP recovery code, which thankfully was in English.

12. Selected "Install", then navigated to the SD card, selected the A789_ROW....zip file, and followed the menu. Then I selected "Wipe" and "Cache", which may or may not have been necessary.

13. Rebooted and lo and behold, I had a (mostly) working system with working GPS.

Note to others who are confused as I was: there's no scatter file involved and I never used the flash tool.

One thing that's not working now is the Gmail app. I haven't figured out yet how to fix that. Other apps are working to the extent that I've investigated.

Again, thanks much to Cybermaus for all the effort put into this.