[Lenovo A850] René Droidz:
Thanks for shedding a bit of light on my dead Lenovo’s phone. I really appreciate your insight. :good:

I have a 15 years of experience as a Windows desktop application developer, while I love Android there are some issues on their platforms that sometime can be counter intuitive. I personally only had Samsung and HTC phones, was always a breeze to flash, root and maintain. This MTK phone is giving me headaches. If ADB libs were indeed removed I will need to go through a yoga sessions before I throw this phone on the wall! :silly:

This is my girlfriend’s phone, everything was stock, standard and unrooted. If OTA was installed, well I really don’t know for sure but it was certainly not her who install it.

If Chinese or ROW I got no idea. This phone was bought here in Vietnam from a reputable Lenovo authorized retailer and my girlfriend said it was "Chinese". I assume that the proximity with China’s market would point out to a non-ROW model. Android System Recovery 3e is posting some message at the bottom in Vietnamese, it really makes me wonder if it could be ROW? I wish there could be some kind of indication into the model/serial number to sort this out once for all. Anyway, I ran unto MTKDroidtools, looks interesting but it remains useless for the time being. I will try my 1st best shot at MTKDroidtools once I restore the USB connection.

The USB connector has been loose and had intermittent charging issues for very long time. For more than a year my girlfriend gave to it all sort of bending, twisting and tilting at every possible angles in order to fully charge her phone. She even played into the connector with some hair pins! I guess the charging board had enough beating and at 4$ a replacement part it may worth to replace it and pray for a miracle. :angel:

Beside the USB connectivity issues, for long time her phone was constantly out of internal storage and that was triggering all sort of problems. Removing applications was never freeing enough space to keep the phone functional long enough. She had this problem 18 months long, before even meeting me! Lenovo prevents to move apps to SD. With all those issues and with the battery draining bloatware I have seen enough of Lenovo’ crap. I was considering to schedule a full flash on this phone with possibly a custom ROM on her next day off in two weeks. I assumed her phone would hold it up till then. Meanwhile I finally managed to free a good chunk of memory by removing Viber’s pictures and logs, something like 300mb. I felt her phone was breathing and running smooth again, it did well for two weeks until the recent fatal boot loop incident happen. After I freed some space her phone went into many updates, I did not really pay attention to what needed to be updated. I guess after 18 months a lot of updates where pending. If firmware updates were pushed in her phone through OTA, I have no idea but it sounds plausible.

The one thing that puzzled me was the fact that this phone says it has two SD cards, one must be some kind of software emulation. I noticed that when her phone was still functional but I never had the time to dig into this. Even Android System Recovery is looking for updates.zip on two different SD, so it looks like some kind of low level partition to me. Was there something on that second SD that I could have deleted by accident that could have created this boot loops?

I will work more on my USB connectivity issues and I will share my findings about my outcomes! :)

Thank you so much! :)