[TouchPad Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] jjmasth:
My Touchpad (16GB) currently gets stuck at www.palm.com/ROM with an exclamation mark inside a triangle, very possibly caused by a corrupted bootloader and lack of webOS recovery mode.

Here's a little back story for you to help me out.

I installed Android Kitkat on it a while back using jcsullins' famous Touchpad Toolbox. At that time, I chose to completely remove webOS. Of course webOS recovery stayed by default. Lately I became interested in experimenting with Linux on my Touchpad. So I tried to install Ubuntu on it by following castrwilliam's instructions:

https://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2132703

and

https://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2225462

Clearly I didn't do my research sufficiently. When I did

novacom boot mem:// < uImage.SmackMe2

the installation was aborted and I got the following message:

"Android is already installed in the ACMEinstaller way.

Back it up and run the ACMEuninstaller, then re-run this SmackMe installer."

I decided to take a shortcut without thinking it through. Rather than launch jcsullins' Touchpad Toolbox to remove Android, I directly went with

novacom boot mem:// < ACMEUninstaller

The above two steps were done while I still had webOS reovery mode (the big USB symbol in the middle of the screen). But from this point on, I couldn't get to webOS recovery mode. Instead, each time I tried to reboot the Touchpad by pressing down power and home keys simultaneously for over 30 seconds, I went to the www.palm.com/ROM screen and got stuck there.

Now that Android appeared to be no longer in the system, I thought I'd give

novacom boot mem:// < uImage.SmackMe2

another go. Again, it was unsuccessful. Several lines that caught my eye are

Mounting boot partition

Mounting media LV

Mouting webOS root

mount: special device /dev/store/root does not exist

The final line above was alarming to me.

The installation just halted and the screen got stuck with two penguins and a screen full of information. And it wasn't frozen as the cursor kept flashing. The final two lines are

current MEDIA size = 14536M

/etc/init.d/S99smackme: line 168: syntax error: 14536 + 8.00m - 0 - 8

At this point, I realized the Ubuntu installation wasn't going anywhere. So I should try to recover my Touchpad to a working machine and then think about Ubuntu from there.

So I looked around online and collected some files (I thought might be helpful). I got uImage.ClockworkMod and tried to put the non-functioning Touchpad into cwm recovery. I typed

novacom boot mem:// < uImage.ClockworkMod

in a terminal while the Touchpad was still stuck at "www.palm.com/ROM".

I got to a CWM interface. Then I copied a certain CyanongenMod file (cm-11-20150113-SNAPSHOT-jcsullins-tenderloin.zip) from my laptop to the Touchpad with ADB

adb push cm-11-20150113-SNAPSHOT-jcsullins-tenderloin.zip /sdcard/.

FIle copying was successful.

Then I tried to install this zip inside CWM by choosing "install zip from sdcard". The system was at least responding to that. But I got the following messages on the screen.

CWM-based Recovery v6.0.1.9

E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/command

E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/log

E:Can't open /cache/recovery/log

E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/last_log

E:Can't open /cache/recovery/last_log

No files found.

No files found.

-- Installing: /sdcard/cm-11-20150113-SNAPSHOT-jcsullins-tenderloin.zip

E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/last_install

E:failed to open last_install: No such file or directory

Finding update package...

Opening update package...

set_metadata_recursive: some changes failed

E:Error in /sdcard/cm-11-20150113-SNAPSHOT-jcsullins-tenderloin.zip

(Status 7)

Installation aborted.

I have some ideas about the set_metadata_recursive error. But all the mounting errors led me to believe my ultimate problem is the partitioning on my Touchpad was destroyed by earlier uninstall of Android.

In summary, my Touchpad is stuck at www.palm.com/ROM. It can enter CWM recovery only through external intervention with

novacom boot mem:// < uImage.Clockworkmod

It has no ability to enter webOS recovery mode. WebOS Doctor couldn't find it.

My own diagnosis of the problems is that the bootloader is corrupted. The filesystem no longer exists because the partitioning was broken.

If you've read so far, I want to thank you for your patience. I just want to present as much detail as possible so that someone here can help me with the problem.

Given the fact that CWM can be "injected" into this broken Touchpad from outside (internally the recovery is obviously no more), I'm assuming there should be a way to salvage it.

Please help. Thank you.