[Motorola Droid RAZR] Ohmster:
2¢ This is a long post about trying to restore your /pds folder, perhaps from another phone. It has come to my attention that Mr. Chen also has this issue, he is an IT Engineer with decades of experience. Maybe we can get some information from him on how this works, if it is possible, and what to watch out for. So before you get into this long list of instructions, stay tuned and watch what Mr. Chen has to say. ;)

Ohhh, my2¢, this is not very good news and may explain a LOT on why you are having so very much trouble with your phone and networking in particular. But everyone is here to help you so hang on a minute, buddy! :cowboy:

You have always been the APN and orange bars guy. Networking issues. While I am the black screen guy. I lost my phone for good when I lost LTE and 4G and I do believe that I also had lost my /pds folder.

I have been rooting, romming, and in this particular web forum for years, see my membership status. I just learned of this very important folder by accident, a month ago. When I got my replacement phone from insurance, I was a bit paranoid and I asked stargo if there is anything I need be careful of before I alter this phone. He told me to immediately backup the /pds folder the moment I got root and could access it. Now everyone is becoming aware of it. I looked in my old phone before sending it back for the /pds folder and could not find it anywhere, nor did I know where it "should be". Of course I could not find it, the folder was long gone from so much rooting and romming and I had no inkling to back it up. :(

[MENTION=3865478]iamteachme[/MENTION] asked on October 3rd how to change his WiFi MAC address for his job in the Q&A forum. I did some digging, only to find out this information is stored in the /pds/wifi/nvs_map.bin file. When you run as root in the phone terminal window, "wifical.sh", you are running a shell script that will read the nvs_map.bin file and commit the WiFi MAC address to the device. Myself and Mr. Chen know how to change this to a desired or "your old MAC address" if you still have it. I take a lot of screenshots of my phone and have several of the "About Phone" screen so it is not difficult for me to recall such information. I also started collecting files; image files, screenshots, backups, text files, binary files, and even pdf versions of XDA posts that I think are very helpful. By chance, do you have any very old backups or other files from your phone, possibly back before you lost your /pds folder? It may be possible to restore a very old backup, copy the /pds folder to your ext-sdcard or USB to PC in order to capture your original copy. Then restore your Safe Strap backup of what you have now and restore the /pds folder back to it's location in the very root of the filesystem tree, "/".

Another possibility is to take my /pds folder (I have an XT912, Verizon, US) and put it on your phone to test it out. Before doing this, make screenshots of all of your About Phone screens, several if you must to capture them all. Also capture ALL of the "Status" screens once you are in there. Those screenshots of the /About Phone/ and /About Phone/Status/ should give us all the information we need as to what to restore or change if necessary. Go through all of your old camera uploads in Dropbox or however you get screenshots to your PC and look for some very old screencaps of the /About Phone/ and /About Phone/Status/ screens. That would give us a target of what to restore back to.

And then backup everything! Current installed cm11 rom, Stock rom, Run Titanium Backup (Enable the save to cloud options in menu.) and in the Schedules portion, also run the "Backup to Dropbox, Gdrive, or Box" options you can enable in the Titanium Backup menu. Turn on those "off device backup options" and run them manually (Must run cloud backups manually first time to get logged in.) immediately to get copies of your stuff, backed up off the device. Backing up to Dropbox takes a while, I just updated all backups in TiBu and then ran the "Sync to Dropbox" last night. Takes a while to push 700Mb up to Dropbox so you may wish to use WiFi for that and do it when going to bed. Once you have done a single Synch to Dropbox and Sync to Google Drive, you can then edit your schedule such as "backup new user +system apps & newer versions" and at the bottom, where it says "When finished", change to "Sync to Dropbox", same for Google Drive. Do that once a week at night when you are in bed. Turn on WiFi if you do not have unlimited data.

I do not believe copying another device's /pds folder to your phone to be a dangerous or even a risky operation as you can always boot to Safe Strap and use it's internal File Manager to move the /pds folder to ext-sdcard, thus disabling it, or delete it altogether. You would then have to run wifical.sh as root in a terminal and would end up with MY WiFi MAC address until we edit the file and restore your old one or give you a new one. Having my WiFi MAC would not likely cause problems unless were were connecting to the very same wireless network with WiFi. Good for testing at the very least. Then check all the other fields in your About Phone screen to see what else has been affected.

Listen 2¢, you are a very decent guy and a well respected member. We want to help you. Getting that /pds folder back on your device would go a long way to making your phone more reliable, especially networking where you seem to have the most issues. I have attached a zip file containing my entire /pds folder tree and inside you will find a text file, "pds.txt" that is a directory listing, showing all files, folders within, as well as the owner, group, and permissions for each one in the event you need to manually set the permissions. Now you have a 2 page text list that you can print out of how the permissions should be and can check them in a rooted file manager such as the one supplied in cm11 or my favorite, ES File Explorer.

We did a lot of talking about this WiFi MAC and /pds stuff in the Q&A Thread, the last few discussions. Check them out. :D

You do have the attention of people here who can and will help you, plus we can always go out for bigger guns. If you want, and have current backups made, take the /pds zip file, unzip it, get it into your phone and drop it into the root filesystem, "/" right at the top. Run wifical.sh as root in a terminal window. Check your about screens to see if anything is funky. Test it out. If this does not help, remove it or move it "off system" to your ext-sdcard to disable it. Give us your old or desired WiFi MAC address and we can alter the address in your /pds/wifi/nvs_map.bin file. I wrote a How-To here but Mr. Chen is a 10+ year IT tech and will probably improve my writeup and publish it. He also is very good at this stuff and can help modify the /pds files to suit your personal needs should issues arise.

We got your back, buddy. Go for it! :good: