[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] H4ckJack:
Hello, XDA forumites!

I've been lurking and reading a lot of threads in here for years, using all your knowledge to fix various phones. Today though is the day I first post and it is for good reason. I'm a guy who loves challenges but this one is making me go insane. I've spend the last two days looking for ways to fix this phone but NOTHING works.

So, the deal is that this phone turns on fine. It boots, it gets to the lockscreen and... it restarts itself. Again and again and again until the battery is removed. To fix it, I've tried the following:

- recovering/updating it through the Huawei official "firmware" supplied by the site: you put the file they supply on an SD card, inside a folder named "dload" and then hold vol up and down along with the power button to make the phone install the contents of that file, named UPDATE.APP. Needless to say it doesn't work. A menu appears with the options reboot system now, apply update from sdcard, apply update from cache, wipe/data factory reset, wipe cache partition and calibrate touch screen. Trying to apply update from sdcard only lets me browse the SD looking for the file but doesn't actually see the file itself, it just shows the dload folder empty (I've tried with 4 different versions of the file compatible with phones from Central America which is where I am ATM). Also, the factory reset does nothing (although it shows it wipes data), everything's there when I start the phone up.

- flashing it with SD Flash Tool: apparently partially works with the last version 3 of the tool (although nothing changes) while version 5 of SDFT doesn't even see the phone (drivers are correctly installed, adb detects it, more on this later). A problem that arises is that I can't flash the SEC_RO package on it (don't know why) nor the PRELOADER (not that one is supposed to normally, but I feel like it would fix my problem in this case).

- cleaning it in safe mode: booting it in safe mode made me notice that it was an app pretending to be Whatsapp causing the restarts (or, perhaps, the one that loads immediately after? The phone has several malware apps). In safe mode those apps didn't load so the phone stayed on. So I cleaned everything, activated USB debugging (for later use in adb mode) and restarted only to find everything as it was before I did the cleanup. I tried rooting it in safemode, cleaning again, still reverts to full "normality" after the restart. Same results when using the phone's proprietary SW HiSuite.

- installing CWM's recovery img through adb+fastboot: I installed all the possible - necessary or unnecessary - drivers (Google's, phone's official ones, PDANet ones) and the phone is correctly detected by the PC (visible in Device Manager) and is visible through the adb devices command. But as soon as I adb reboot bootloader it to fastload the CWM image, the phone stops being seen correctly and doesn't show up in fastboot devices, only showing "NEW: SAFE OLD:RISK" on a black background on its screen.

So, to recap: the phone restarts because of a malware at startup, reverts any and all changes made to it in safemode, doesn't wipe from the recovery menu, apparently has a corrupted bootloader and is impervious to normal flashing SW... Anyone got any more ideas on how to deal with it? The only option left that comes to mind is to fix it directly by flashing the internal memory using JTAG/RIFF but I don't have the equipment (nor do I intend to buy it).