[General Questions and Answers] DiamondJohn:
Help! restore MMS/SMS/Calls from screen black but working phone

I have a bit of an issue.:eek: and am running out of ideas.

My phone is running, but the screen is black :silly:

I know the phone is running because if I hold down the power button when the phone would be sleeping, the flash (ie torch) turns on, which is a feature of my ROM. Also, when I hold the power button down, the pop-up dialog window to turn off/restart/airplane mode pops up and is usable. Also, during the boot sequence, the boot animation plays perfectly... And then the screen goes black. Also, booting to TWRP works perfectly fine.

I tried booting to safe mode, and ironically, the screen is completely black EXCEPT for the words in the bottom left of the screen saying "Safe Mode":mad:

I tried dirty flashing my ROM, and all that did was revert my custom boot animation back to the ROM default.

I also tried going into TWRP and deleting all under /data/app (and wiping dalvik & cache) but that did not help either (in case it was a misbehaving 3rd party app). Also tried deleting all under /data/data and /data/user_se (but if that did work, it would of also cleared my call logs anyway)

If I wipe the data partition, the phone boots and the screen isn't black, however, all else is of course lost.:crying:

My issue is that i do not have a recent backup of my SMS, MMS and Calls.

I have never used the ADB backup methods, as I have TWRP. My first question is does the ADB backup method include Calls, SMS & MMS?

The phone is rooted and adb/shell is rooted, does anyone have an idea how I could get the SMS, MMS and calls backed up and restored? I think I will need to do a full wipe and clean flash.

I have actually already extracted the call history from a TWRP backup (if I was forced, and the plain textural SMS), but the MMS is what I dont know how to recover (ie attached images, videos etc) As I said, I have access to TWRP, but that backs up everything including whatever is causing the screen blackout.

Anyone got any ideas?

---------- Post added at 11:15 ---------- Previous post was at 10:20 ----------

I dont understand what you are asking me:confused:

Are you asking:

1. How the devs get the proprietary blobs?

These are pulled from the original firmware. ie default original ROM

2. How the ROM source code to integrate with the blobs is obtained?

As android is open source, the original firmware (ie ROM)'s source code is provided by the manufacturer. This source also identifies which files (ie blobs) are required. ie point 1.

3. What happens when no source is available?

I think legally to use android, the manufacturers have to release the source code as open source. Of course, they can be slow about it or if its some tiny chinese company, they can simply shutdown or hide. In that case, I would *GUESS* finding a device with the same hardware and trying the blobs and source from that sometimes works; especially if the company copied another existing device. But the plain fact is that not all phones have their source easily available and is sometimes the reason no custom ROMs are available.

Did any of that answer your question?

NB: I have never done the above myself, I have always simply reused others works, but the above is my understanding how it was done.