yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I did have a recovery image to load with the scatter file. Whenever I would try to load it I would get an error about needing to redownload my PMT, which means the scatter file is detected to be incompatible. Antonio and I know 100% it's compatible, as we used that exact scatter to pull both stock recovery and stock boot images from the phone. For some reason it just doesn't like it in download mode and we have no idea why.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
ANYONE WITH A STOCK NON-AMAZON R1 HD, YOUR HELP IS NEEDED NOW!

We need someone with an unlocked bootloader to test flash our built recovery through fastboot (fastboot flash recovery recovery.img). Antonio is allowing me to openly share the files for anyone willing to test. Just be aware there's a risk of your device not working afterwards, which should be able to be fixed by flashing back stock recovery.

Anyone interested please say so, and I'll get you in a Google Hangouts group where we can discuss further instructions.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] Jstame:
Unlocking bootloader completely erases entire phone. Without a full firmware file or backup to reflash after unlocking the bootloader the phone would be inoperable wouldn't it?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
From my knowledge bootloader unlock just erases user data, like doing a factory reset. At least with other phones anyway. Are you positive it erases absolutely everything?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] travlock:
A OEM unlock should only erase the /data partition of the phone. Considering its a part of Android it shouldnt erase anything else unless Blu is doing something sketchy which I doubt
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] Jstame:
Entire internal memory was wiped on my ht7 pro.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] triggerlord:
Can confirm. "Remove ads" only removes the ads. It doesn't enable any of the locked features.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
Were you at least able to capture anything?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] travlock:
That sucks. Figures amazon wouldn't switch which ota was sent to the phone. So how did amazon patch the lock screens ads? was it an ota? if it wasn't an ota im guessing com.pheonix.android waits for a certain server to issue a command disabling the ads.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] Jstame:
I only have the ad version but my new one arrives today. Only thing wrong with the return device is I can't boot stock recovery. I'm willing to try and flash a recovery.img you guys think may work since I'm not worried about bricking it before it goes back. I've played around a good bit with spft and scatter files with my mtk6735 ht7 pro so I have a some experience with it. Can't hurt anything to try and I understand that these aren't my files so info will be reported directly to you only.... Basically have until Aug 20th to play around as much as I like with the phone thats going back!
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] triggerlord:
I didn't get an OTA. The lockscreen just stopped showing ads.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
If you've requested a replacement once, you can't do it again. I'd be more careful about bricking it if I were you, especially considering there's no stock firmware.

EDIT: Oh you're playing with the broken one, same here. Nevermind.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] Jstame:
I just got the new one in the mail today but I have until Aug 20 to send the old one back that's the one I'm not worried about bricking. Other then cant access recovery its works great
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
Just as a warning, it seems that if you break one partition the whole phone refuses to boot. I formatted my recovery partition, and nothing will boot. Not even android or fastboot.

EDIT: Looking back, the only reason the partition broke is because I accidentally formatted it. Had I stuck with Download Mode, everything would've been OK.

Let me outline the steps that someone with an unlocked bootloader would need to take, if they choose to do this:

Flash custom recovery through fastboot (it should allow because the bootloader would be unlocked)

Boot into custom recovery and flash SuperSU to gain root privileges

Boot into Android and connect the phone to MTKDroidTools 2.5.3D (the one that has partial support for 64 bit)

Get a scatter file from MTKDroidTools and share it with the rest of us, since I believe you need root to get a full scatter file

Use that scatter file to pull the partitions from the device (system.img, recovery.img, boot.img, preloader stuff, etc.)

Zip those files and share it with us so we now have a stock ROM we can flash back to in case anything goes awry

Then, using that scatter file the rest of us can flash custom recovery and get root. Looking even further ahead, that scatter file can be used for porting custom ROMs. There is a risk to unlocking the bootloader, since apparently on a few phones it erases the entire system upon unlocking, but whoever takes this risk would be regarded an R1 HD hero.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] waingro808:
Thanks. This tool worked like a charm :good: I was looking for the driver everywhere....
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] mrmazak:
I should have been more clear. I know these two are quite different. I meant I compared that sites' file for the mt6753 and the file I pulled from my mt6753. I have not been able to pull the scatter file from the Mt 6735(blu R1HD) because when the phone goes into recovery mode and is blocked by the sys prop settings.

---------- Post added at 09:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:20 PM ----------

I willgive it a go.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] krchi:
Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work and I know for sure the phone is compatible with N mode it's most likely just router and phone not compatible with each other, not sure how that'll work since it never happened to me but I don't feel like getting new one from amazon maybe if it bothers even more later. The router is DIR 615 B2 so if anyone has that router N mode might not work, just throwing it out there. For the Amazon 30 day return can anyone tell me if amazon also pays for the shipping?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bibikalka:
How did you manage to format the recovery partition ? Which tools did you use ? Did you pull the battery out ? Or did R1 just show up as a preloader early in the boot process, so you installed drivers, and got going ?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I used SP Flash Tools. When trying to flash recovery I chose Firmware Upgrade instead of Download Only. This wiped recovery, then failed to flash, leaving me with a blank partition.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bibikalka:
Did you need a driver for SP Flash Tools ? Making a scatter file is not difficult, and then one would need to download all the partitions, and double check that everything is correct. This is not difficult, just tedious ...
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I needed a driver for SP, for the phone to show up as a VCOM serial port when plugged in while off. Scatter files are not hard to make, but they are when MTKDroidTools doesn't support your chipset or architecture. Even the latest version has minimal support for 64 bit MTK chipsets, let alone an MT6735.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] Oscar_david:
A great many devices are bricked by trying to flash something without reliable information about where it should be flashed. So the importance of the scatter file cannot be understated for an MTK device.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
[MENTION=5312578]mrmazak[/MENTION] and I are working on this. We hope that with root, MTKDroidTools will be able to make a scatter file for the R1. His is the non-Prime variant, but it should still work. If he can flash custom recovery with his unlocked bootloader, root will be 30 seconds away. Once we get a scatter, he can then pull all the partitions and we can make our own makeshift SP Flash Tools image in case anything goes wrong.

Oh for the record, unlocking bootloader did not wipe the entire phone, just the user data partition.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] emc2cube:
Try this one http://www.mediafire.com/download/ea0xxtpse8vl6gb/MT65x3_USB_VCOM_drivers.zip

According to http://community.umidigi.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=3091&extra=page=1&filter=typeid&typeid=105 (another MT6735 based phone) it's compatible with MT67xx phones
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I'll be glad to try on my bricked one, but I've tried supposedly "generic" scatters before and I get the same issue every time.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] emc2cube:
That's not a scatter, that's the VCOM driver.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
My apologies, I didn't read the quoted text and assumed you were talking about a scatter :P
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
Bad news guys, Antonio tells me that the 2.3.5D version of MTKDroidTools is incapable of making scatter files. We need to look for another tool.

EDIT: The following article says SpaceMTKTool can make a full SP Flash Tools flashable image of your entire device, so if someone could do that and send it to me for unbrick that'll be great:

http://gsmuploads.blogspot.com/2016/03/how-to-use-space-tool-mtk-toolkit.html
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] lordmorphous:
Just tried it tonight. I have a postpaid AT&T account. Worked quite well.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
The only backup options are for 4.4.x and 5.x and when trying to do it in 5.x it looks like it fails because it needs root.

Also the tool seems a little shaddy, there's a random button at the bottom right that takes you to, what looks like, a fake bing page and when you uninstall it it doesn't actually remove itself.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] DeltaP42:
Unfortunately it looks like the dropbox hosting that download has gone over its limit and is disabled. Once it goes back up I'll grab it and see what I can do. I have the Prime version, does that matter? I'm exchanging it for the higher-priced no-ads version, which gets here on Monday. Hopefully we'll have some sort of a solution for rooting by then! *fingers crossed*

EDIT: nvm, looks like someone already tried.

On a side note, is it even a good idea to exchange it for the vanilla non-Prime version? If we do find a way, is that version going to be easier to root, or will they both be pretty much the same? Having that OEM toggle seems like it would be beneficial.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Having the OEM toggle means that you can just flash a TWRP recovery once its made and then flash SU. The prime version just makes it harder because of no toggle.

---------- Post added at 10:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:07 PM ----------

On another note [MENTION=5006327]jasonmerc[/MENTION] are you certain that the only mistake made was that you did the firmware upgrade and not download only in SPFT? I have a prime version and and another two weeks to mess around before the 30 days are up and am willing to try the recovery if that's the case.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
Yes. Download Only kept giving me a problem that the scatter was incompatible and it wouldn't even try to flash. Firmware Upgrade formatted the indicated partitions before trying to flash, and of course it failed when it tried to flash. So I'm left with a blank recovery partition and because of that my phone won't boot to anything.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Okay, Well I'm willing to try it if you want to PM me the files.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
Antonio actually gave me the OK to put the files out there, as long as you guys understand the risk that this might soft brick your device (or worse). Gimme a minute or so and I'll edit the post with the recovery link.

EDIT: Link to CTR touch recovery ported to the R1 by Antonio:

https://mega.nz/#!NlU0jSiB!oaDiT4d814trj27DJCMkqxWr_PnV5ar10P1aRdW1z-Q
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] krchi:
Not sure if this piece of information is useful at all but I was messing with the updated 2gb variant of the blu r1 hd and I got this menu and I did a quick search on metaboot and it seems like it could be relevant? I'm not sure if someone knows what metaboot is can they explain to me?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] lopestom:
It's only for tests the hardware. Factory mode can be help if your device have something wrong.

[MENTION=3471223]bullet25[/MENTION]

Maybe after that time you can return if work or not the CWM-CTR?

[MENTION=5006327]jasonmerc[/MENTION] is a hero here bcoz accepted the risks... But for all having the progress!!
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Okay, I do get the scatter file error message. Looking at the scatter file from the update zip and the generic one it looks like the only differences are:

Cache (which also means system partition size)

Userdata

Flashinfo

sgpt

This could probably be modified if anybody knows address sizing in hex... :D
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I believe [MENTION=4939713]lopestom[/MENTION] tried this already with my flashing attempts, but I might be wrong.

EDIT: Wait a second guys, Antonio told me to warn you to not use SP Flash Tool for now, as he believes SPFT can mess up the /system and /data partitions by automatically trying to assign hex values to them in terms of memory location. Stand by for further info on this issue.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Okay well, for right now my phone is still okay, even after trying to modify the generic scatter.

I could be completely wrong but I think maybe it isn't accepting the scatter file, even with correct memory values, is because the top section would need to be changed for this phone

- general: MTK_PLATFORM_CFG
info:
- config_version: V1.1.2
platform: MT6735M
project: n325b
storage: EMMC
boot_channel: MSDC_0
block_size: 0x20000

Like I said, I'm willing to try stuff until about August 10th ish.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I'm speaking to him about what he meant by that, but if you're just trying to flash recovery then I assume you'll be fine. Flash with your modified scatter and report back how it goes! Just make sure you're using the latest SP Flash Tools (16XX) so it's compatible with the chipset.

EDIT: Oh once again I didn't read it properly, I thought your quoted text was your modified header made specifically for this device. Perhaps we can look in a build.prop to fill in most of that information.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Okay I got a success in SPFT but...

When I try to boot into recovery the phone acts like its going to, reboots and boot normally. Then If I use adb reboot recovery I get normal stock recovery. So I'm assuming that this phone has that thing where if you don't boot into recovery after a flash it reloads the stock one.

I've also attached the scatter I used.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
You have a working scatter? You're a hero!!!
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
I can't say its going to work for everything but it at least got a success message. I modified the memory values using a hex calculator, but honestly I'm not really sure if I even did it correctly.

Now if I could get it to boot into recovery after the success without it booting to android...
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
That could be a bootloader implementation keeping you from using custom recovery. You clearly got it to flash, which solves that problem. Now we can focus our attention elsewhere.

Hopefully I can unbrick my device with this scatter! Maybe I can cancel the replacement request and keep it for another rainy day!

EDIT: SPFT doesn't want to detect my device with the new scatter

EDIT2: SPFT doesn't want to detect my device with any scatter now

EDIT3: Well now I think its hard bricked, I can boot to the boot selector but when I select anything it shuts itself off. When I plug it in to charge I get a red battery with the "TOOL DL error" but after a while it shuts itself off there as well.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
That doesn't sound good. Was it the scatter file that did it?

also do you have a link to the 2.3.5D version of MTK droid tools? I can only seem to find 2.3.5.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I'll link the D version soon. The scatter did nothing, it was like this before. I held down power for a while and eventually it flashed. Let's see if it turns on now.

EDIT: Flashed fine but still doesn't turn on
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
If it might help I can upload the rom readback from SPFT for you.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
Oh don't go through the trouble. I don't think it'll be necessary anymore.

The damn battery was dead...
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] Oscar_david:
When this is the case, you would normally pull the battery without issuing the reboot command in adb.

You could try not sending the reboot command, unplug, and hold the power button until the phone goes off. Then rebooting.

Good progress though. I might try it myself when bi get home.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Yeah, that's what I did, rebooted into fastboot then choose recovery the screen goes to the boot logo with the fastboot menu over it like its about to go into recovery, reboots again then goes to normal android boot.

---------- Post added at 01:29 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:28 AM ----------

Nice, I actually did something useful. :D

Also, how do we not have a sub forum yet?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
After another session with Antonio, turns out the TWRP image he made was corrupt when trying to flash to a vanilla bootloader unlocked R1. We may need 2 separately built recoveries for each variant. He didnt really get into detail about it but I'll try speaking with him tomorrow.

[MENTION=3471223]bullet25[/MENTION], if you could work your hexadecimal-calculating magic for the rest of the partitions, you could manually build us a functioning scatter file. I'm not sure what you did exactly, but whatever it was it worked well enough to bring my phone back from the grave. You can be our MTKDroidTools!
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
What else isn't working in it?

So this is what I did. Every start address from the OTA scatter up to cache was the same as the generic scatter. So I figured what needed to be changed were the start, both linear and physical, address for cache, userdata. (flashinfo and sgpt had the same start address). and the sizes of system, cache, userdata I figured needed to be changed too. So I replaced the start address of cache and userdata then took cache's start address and in a hex calculator I subtracted system's start address to get the system size, same process for cache size (userdata start - cache start) and same for user data size, (flashinfo start - userdata start) and replaced the values I got into the size field.

I honestly have no idea if that's correct, or even how its done, but something worked. I also have no idea why the start value for Flashinfo and SGPT would be the same if they are further up the memory addressing. I figured that they must be at those address since the stock scatter says they are.

I hope that makes sense.

EDIT:

I also changed the top info to "MT6735" from "MT6735M" and project to "R1_HD"

The only other thing I think could need to be changed is at the top "Block_size" but I have no idea what to change that to.

EDIT 2: I mean, I'm personally just kind of changing stuff hoping I don't break something. :D

I was half expecting to try that scatter file and it just cause the phone to explode or something.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
What you just said made my head spin, probably because it's 2am. I'm not sure if anything else is broken, but it wouldn't hurt to check.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] triggerlord:
Huh, you know that battery indicator issue people were having in the first few pages? I had it to. But everytime I charge this phone at night the issue seems to be fixing itself. I've had this phone for two days and the indicator is normal now.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Okay so the phone does in fact replace recovery when android normal boots. The file "Recovery-from-boot.p" is in the /system folder. If there is a way to remove that file it should allow us to boot into the recovery without the worry of android replacing it.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bibikalka:
Typically there is a script that verifies the checksum for recovery, and if it's not what it's supposed to be - the script overwrites it. When you install SuperSU via TWRP or something, it'll move this script out of the way, so the recovery will no longer get overwritten !
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I remember TWRP talking about preventing stock recovery flash-back after first reboot with my Studio X+. The issue here is we can't even boot into custom recovery to disable the script.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
Right, and there is something else on the phone stopping it from booting to the modified recovery.

I had another random thought. Could SPFT be used to flash a modified boot.img that already has su?
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I spoke with MrMazak about using a boot image with root, but he says it's possible this could lead to brick. I don't think he wants to try it, but I'll post the website here in case anyone else wants to:

http://whiteboard.ping.se/Android/Rooting

This website talks about needing unlocked bootloader, but I believe that's just for flashing a modded boot image. Clearly we can bypass this with SPFT.

EDIT: CarlivImageTool (or at least that's what I think it's called, I'm not at my computer) can't unpack R1 boot images. It claims they have an "unknown compression format". Perhaps Android Kitchen will give us better luck.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bibikalka:
I think the issue is this - both recovery and boot.img need to be signed to boot. So one can overwrite them with no issues, but they will still not boot since they are not signed properly. It's a condition that's hard to overcome - a lot of recent Amazon devices (Fire tablets, Fire TV) have this.

A way to handle this is to implant SuperSu into the image of /system, and then overwrite /system from SPFT with this modified version. Then further upgrades can happen via Flashfire when you implant SuperSu right after system update (although I've noticed that BLU R1 updates everything via individual file patches, and not the wholesale replacement of the /system image like on Fire tablets). So in this case SuperSu will actually survive OK.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] DeltaP42:
If you can give me instructions on what to do to test this, I'm willing to give it a shot. My phone is going to be returned soon anyway (OEM unlock version coming Monday) so :good: I'm only a novice around these parts so I'm of limited value, but I'll sacrifice my phone for the greater good if I know what to do.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] jasonmerc:
I'm going to try the boot image thing anyway. It's the only thing I can really think of at this point. When I compile everything I'll PM you and tell you how to flash them with SPFT.

Oh also, I flashed a stock boot image using bullet's scatter, so we know boot images work as well.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] triggerlord:
Does this phone support downloading and booting from a recovery.img file? Without installing it to the phone?

Edit: I mean from fastboot mode.
[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] bullet25:
You can't without the bootloader unlocked.

"Fastboot boot" is an accepted command I tried it with a random twrp image day one to find out. It errors saying that the bootloader is locked.