[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] Lister Of Smeg:
Hi [MENTION=5919159]Tzul[/MENTION],

Well, ya certainly know what ya talking about... was a great read. I am technically minded. I do (and have done for about 15/20 years) IT Support. I understand the talk, sometimes we all gotta re-learn new tricks... :)

Ok, you'll love this... I spoke to Lenovo today... Actually very good support really, much better than when we phone up about PCs not working in our company. Anyway, they were still unable to help me with the Tablet.

I spoke to them about not being able to get into Recovery / Bootloader. Didnt tell them why of course, but explained that I wanted to know if there was an official firmware I could download if I wished to return the Tablet to fully stock without any Apps. Blamed my dad messing it up, which is kinda true... even though he has not touched it yet. Anyway, they talked me through many things, BASICALLY WHAT YOU'VE ALREADY TOLD ME.... About holding down Vol Up and Power button. After many attempts, still not working. So I said there is a 22mb update pending, I'll try that and see if that allows me to do the key combo... Still no joy. He told me to do a factory reset in the Android OS (which I knew anyway). And so did that, and sure enough it wiped everything, even Developer Settings. However after re-enabling it again, the OEM Bootloader was STILL UNLOCKED? lol.

Anyway, needless to say... I still cannot get into recovery on this device, and he seems certain I should be able too. He thinks the device may be faulty, and suggests returning it... Apart from not being able to get into Recovery, I dont think it is faulty as seems fine everywhere else.

I also tried "Lenovo Smart Assistant" as it seems that can download firmware from there site. After spending a couple of hours trying to get all the (10x different Android device drivers installs, MTP, ADB, MIDI, blah blah) it still didnt automatically detect in their Smart App. So I tried to select the "Dead Device" mode, where you have to enter "Model No" and Hardware ID, typed in various things... but neither showed up the Tablet??? lol

Anyway, going back to above....

1) Installed the suggested signed drivers for the PreLoader

2) Downloaded, edited Options.ini and ran the latest SPFT

3) Opened the Scatter file, nice to see all the partitions.

4) Tried to do a ReadBack of just Boot.img and Recovery.img but nothing downloaded or seemed to happen. But was doing this in a hurry on my lunch break. Shall have another go at home, or back at work tomorrow.

Ah, think I've seen where I went wrong... I didnt double click on the [File] column. I just assumed the path was already correct, looking at it. Also, can't remember the state of the device, think that was also on at the time. So will have a proper go later... and upload the boot.img and recovery.img

-- Just out of interest, if I was making a STOCK ROM backup. What partitions do I need to select / include / tick, for that??

And assume if I wanted to restore it, just do the exact same. Select the partitions, select the files in the [File] tab as to what I want to restore and use DOWNLOAD only mode? Or would it be best just to make the backups in TWRP once/if it's possible...??

As I'm having no joy with the key combo, I'm gonna try the ADB commands in a sec, and let you know how those go.... :)

Yeah, I wont be going there again in a hurry... Didnt have a clue what any of it was, and it wasn't clear at the time how to get out of it either... :( Sadly I selected the very first open, no idea what that was / is ???? but couldn't get out of it either and had to wait till it finished... :(

I saw eMMC and panicked, as I have 3x Samsung devices that all suffer from the eMMC brickbug issue. Where the chip dies if using a faulty kernel. Thankfully this kernel is all but disappeared, as only came about in an official LEAKED Samsung build. And all previous/after official kernels and all custom kernels had this faulty switch removed... ;) But whenever I see eMMC, I worry now... :( lol

Many thanks, Lister