[Motorola Droid Bionic] wburchard:
Droid Bionic Soft-brick Fixed After Jelly Bean Update Attempt Failed

Thought I'd share my experience in case others might find it helpful. Also wanted to thank eric3938 for his post on 16 April 2013 -- it's what saved my Droid Bionic!

I had started with a Droid Bionic with Gingerbread. Updated to ICS when it came out, then rooted it sometime afterwards. I took the OTA Jelly Bean update, but it failed. Then I remembered that I had installed Bionic Bootstrap to get Nandroid backup ability. A bit of research confirmed this was likely the cause of the upgrade failure. I then attempted to follow a set of instructions on how to get a rooted, ICS droid bionic ready for the OTA, lost my place due to an interruption, and decided I needed to restore from one of the nandroid backups, but they kept failing!

I then figured a factory reset was in order, and since I wasn't sure if the phone would boot out of the nandroid backup menu, decided to use the bionic bootstrap factory reset option. BIG mistake! After that reset, the phone would only end up with an image of an android on its back with an exclamation mark inside a red triangle over its open belly.

I spent a lot of time searching for fixes and trying a lot of different things:

1. Downloaded the 4.0.4 image from sbf.droid-developers.org/cdma_targa/list.php, and copied it to the external sd card from the phone with my laptop. Put the sd card back in the phone, booted into recovery and tried to install the update from the external sd card. Update would start, authenticate, and then fail with an error 7, with a message indicating that a file could not be found in the /system/bin folder.

2. Downloaded the 4.1.2 update from sbf.droid-developers.org/cdma_targa/list.php, put it on the external sd card and tried applying it. The update process would not authenticate the update.

3. Tried using RSD Lite 5.7, but could not get it to apply either the 4.0.4 or 4.1.2 images. I would always get a failure at some point.

4. Found the House of Bionic site (droidrzr.com/index.php/topic/5764-samurihls-house-of-bionic/). After reading through the information there, downloaded hob 10.1 and, following instructions, proceeded to attempt to flash 4.0.4 back to the phone. The hob (HouseOfBionic) program would successfully drive the flash with RSD, and the phone would appear to take the flash, but would either remain at the fastboot menu when hob said it would reboot, or would boot and end with the android on its back underneath the read triangle.

The battery of the phone ran down at this point and I could no longer flash anything. I read about the USB Factory Cable Adaptor on the HouseOfBionic site, so I ordered one. It arrived in about 3 days! When it arrived, I tried additional variations with hob, but no joy.

I was about to concede failure when I stumbled across the post by eric3938. From a high-level perspective, his experience seemed very similar to mine, so I decided it was the best option I had. However, after reading about the security issues that prevent regressing from Jelly Bean, I decided that instead of using files from the 4.0.4 release, I would use the files from 4.1.2 release. I then proceeded to do the following:

1. Downloaded and un-zipped the moto-fastboot-win32.zip file from the link in the post by eric3938.

2. Copied the preinstall.img and system.img files out of the 4.1.2 zip into the folder where I had placed the moto-fastboot exe.

3. Booted the phone into fastboot mode.

4. Opened a command window and pasted the following commands, one at a time, into the window and executed them:

moto-fastboot.exe flash preinstall preinstall.img

moto-fastboot.exe flash system system.img​

Un-plugged the phone from the USB cable and then plugged it back in (to reboot it). The phone booted, but then just appeared to hang at a black screen with the four hard buttons at the bottom lighted up. Every time I would remove power and re-apply power, I would get the same results.

I finally pulled the USB cable out, then, while depressing the volume down button and holding down the power button, I inserted the USB cable and then released the power button (while continuing to depress the volume down button). This brought me to the boot option menu. I chose the recovery option. When the recovery menu appeared, I chose the 'apply update from external source' option and selected the Jelly Bean update zip file. IT WORKED!!!

The update authenticated and then began to install. When the update completed it rebooted a couple of times and the crashing sound of the android eye was music to my ears!

A couple of additional notes:

1. At one time during the process, I lost the ability to communicate with the phone from my laptop. I was afraid I had rendered the phone useless, but, after uninstalling the Motorola Driver Manager, rebooting, reinstalling the Motorola Driver Manager, rebooting, and trying again, found I had restored communication with the phone.

2. I discovered that with the factory cable adapter, I could leave the battery out of the phone and not have to pull it at times get to the fastboot menu -- this saved a lot of wear and tear on my fingers!

3. After going through the Jelly Bean setup process, I noticed I did not have 4G network access -- only 3G. I did some more searching and found a suggestion to pull the battery and SIM card, wait a few minutes, reassemble the phone and try again. That did it. I now have 4G network access.

I hope no one has to go through this with their phone; but, if they do, I hope this is helpful.