[K3 Note General] vnathalye:
Lenovo K3 Note not booting / hanged / bricked?

My Lenovo K3 Note that is getting hanged while booting. It’s getting stuck after showing initial Lenovo logo and then showing blank screen forever. I thought it might be taking time to boot so I kept it in that state overnight and it completely drained the battery.

How did I manage to get it into this state?

I was trying to root my phone by following these articles: (It’s the first time I’m trying to root any phone)

(Note: While executing following steps, at different times, based on the suggestions given on different links I’ve done following settings on my phone: USB Debugging=true; Enable OEM Unlock=true; App installation from unknown sources=true)

http://www.cyanogenmods.org/forums/topic/unlock-bootloader-android-phone-using-fastboot/

http://www.cyanogenmods.org/forums/topic/install-twrp-recovery-android-using-fastboot/

http://www.cyanogenmods.org/forums/topic/root-lenovo-k3-note-install-cwm-recovery/#post-16421

As per the first article I tried unlocking OEM.

$ adb reboot bootloader

Got executed properly and my phone was in fastboot mode.

$ fastboot oem unlock

This command was giving an error: Unknown Command. After searching on net I found some link that said it’s unlocked by default on K3 Note. So I executed

$ fastboot getvar all

And I could see that unlocked = yes. So I went on to next step of installing custom recovery.

$ fastboot flash recovery <recovery_image_file.name>

This command was getting executed successfully. The article suggests that we need to execute

$ fastboot reboot

And once the phone is booted, execute

$ adb reboot recovery

When I tried that, it was always loading Lenovo recovery and not the custom one (CWM or TWRP). After searching on net I found one link that said Lenovo stock ROM overwrites the recovery whenever it is booted. So when we execute fastboot reboot and let it boot normally, the recovery was getting reset to Lenovo recovery. The article suggested that just after executing fastboot reboot we should hold Volume Up and Volume Down buttons while the phone is rebooting. That will boot it in recovery mode. And indeed it worked. At first I had flashed CWM recovery and it got loaded properly. So I went ahead to install SuperSU zip file (SR3-SuperSU-v2.79-SR3-20170114223742.zip) but got an error:

Decompressing ramdisk
Failure, aborting

So I tried TWRP recovery and got the same error. So I downloaded another zip (SuperSU-v2.79-201612051815.zip – this was from SuperSu.com, if I remember correctly) and got the same error.

Till this time my phone was OK

. It was booting / rebooting normally and working properly.

Then I searched for this ramdisk error and found this link (https://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=65467562&postcount=15) that suggested I needed to install SuperSu in System Mode. So from https://xdaforums.com/apps/supersu/v2-64-2-66-supersu-mode-t3286120 I downloaded SR3-SuperSU-v2.79-SYSTEMMODE.zip and installed it on my phone. This got installed without any error. I was happy but it did not last long because now my phone is not booting at all. :(

Current situation:

I can execute adb commands, boot it into bootloader / recovery. Fastboot also detects my phone (when booted into bootloader mode). But it doesn’t boot normally.

Currently I’m looking at https://www.recovery-android.com/fix-rooted-phone-that-wonnot-boot.html. As suggested there I’ve cleared cache and rebooted the phone, but that has not helped. (I’ve not wiped dalvik cache.) Should I go ahead and do factory reset? Should I go ahead and install custom ROM like Lineage OS? What should I do to get it in working mode again?