[Windows Phone 8 Development and Hacking] zeizieh:
Hello, I just happened to get a working old Lumia 920 (RM-821) for real cheap. I had no previous experience with Windows phones and no interest to use the official store or make an MS account (does it still even work? I couldn't get the phone to connect to the store or create an account using WiFi even though the browser worked fine...), just thought it'd be an alright camera and basic phone to use if something happens to my main phone. But when I found out that the Lumias have been hacked I instantly wanted to try this out. My Android phone is rooted and even back in the Symbian days I always used a hacked phone with capability restrictions disabled.

I don't want to keep Windows installed on my PCs anymore nowadays (Win10 really sucks unless you're somebody who can get the enterprise LTS or server editions) so I used a virtual machine to run WPInternals. That did seem to work ok at first, it read the phone information correctly and I could switch the phone between regular, label and flash modes successfully.

However after I started the unlocking process the phone just got stuck in a black screen. I waited for while and nothing happened so I disconnected the cable. WPInternals didn't even notice that I disconnected the cable and it was stuck so eventually I just shut down the VM and rebooted it. Started WPInternals again and tried connecting the phone, but WPInternals can't detect the phone at all anymore.

The phone isn't completely dead though, it gets detected by the computer as a serial port/modem device, here's something from the dmesg output from my host Linux OS:

[15315.704941] usbcore: registered new interface driver qcserial

[15315.705016] usbserial: USB Serial support registered for Qualcomm USB modem

[15362.361774] usb 2-1.6: reset high-speed USB device number 18 using ehci-pci

[15367.607423] usb 2-1.6: USB disconnect, device number 18

[15402.621330] usb 2-1.6: new high-speed USB device number 19 using ehci-pci

[15402.734060] usb 2-1.6: New USB device found, idVendor=05c6, idProduct=9008

[15402.734063] usb 2-1.6: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0

[15402.734064] usb 2-1.6: Product: QHSUSB_DLOAD

[15402.734065] usb 2-1.6: Manufacturer: Qualcomm CDMA Technologies MSM

[15402.734570] qcserial 2-1.6:1.0: Qualcomm USB modem converter detected

[15402.734649] usb 2-1.6: Qualcomm USB modem converter now attached to ttyUSB0

So can I still rescue it somehow or is it now a paperweight? Any chance it starts booting normally again when the battery runs out? Any way to power off the phone completely without opening it (I don't own the necessary small Torx bit unfortunately)

I tried installing the qcusbser driver in the VM (initially I only had the WinUSB driver installed, from EmergencyDownloadDriver.msi) but that just caused WPInternals to hang on startup. Actually it got stuck so hard that eventually I had to kill the vmware processes to get rid of the Windows VM because the virtual machine wouldn't shut down and VMware complained it's busy when I tried to power off it from the GUI.

Afterwards I went to get an old laptop which has Win7 still installed but there WPInternals just always crashes on startup, installing drivers and NET framework doesn't help. I actually had this same problem with a Win7 VM which is the first environment I tried running WPInternals in, it always just crashed on startup. I gave up and installed Win10 in another VM and that finally worked (well so far as to get my phone stuck in emergency serial mode...)

Fortunately it's not a big loss even if the phone is permanently lost but it would still be nice to get it working again if it's at all possible.