[General Questions and Answers] manav20:
Hi,

I am in need of some urgent help. I have an unrooted Lenovo K8 Note (without custom recovery), running on Android 8.0. I was using Substratum, kinda newish to it, and the first theme I installed was Gravija. I disabled it later to try out some other themes and apps to modify the UI. And the last app I guess I tried was this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=substratum.xperia.lockscreens which was supposed to give me an Xperia style lock screen clock. It gives a drop down menu to choose the Operating system, etc. and I stupidly chose the first option which was for Nougat roms and rebooted the device. After rebooting, as I couldn't see the clock changed, I did the same and rebooted again. After this, I read its FAQs and realized that I was choosing the wrong option and was supposed to choose the one for my device. As there was no option for an Oreo/AOSP device, I chose the option for Oreo/AOSiP and rebooted. Same result, and therefore did the same thing again. I'd also like to mention that every time I chose to "build and enable", substratum was giving me an error through a toast notification, which I don't remember and ignored, stupidly! As it wasn't working, I then simply uninstalled the app for that theme. Later on, disabled other overlays too. My device was working well for about half an hour when suddenly, everything suddenly came to a standstill. Device became unresponsive and after a few seconds, got rebooted. Since then, it's stuck in bootloops.

Most of the times, it just displays a Lenovo splash screen, then reboots after a few seconds. Sometimes, it goes till the boot animation. While the boot animation is playing, it stops all of a sudden and reboots after a few seconds. And sometimes, it boots up completely, and I unlock it. I am able to use it normally. It happens 1/10 times. But it becomes unresponsive in less than a minute, the statusbar clock stops (I have it set to HH:MM:SS format) and then the device reboots. I am struggling with this since 12 hours ago!

It works long enough for me to be able to go to settings and perform a factory reset. But I have about 40GB of data on its internal storage, including my personal photos and memories, which I don't want to lose and need to back it up before trying to reset.

I am able to connect it to my PC, copy the folders but the phone doesn't last long enough! When the copying process is less than a percent, it reboots again! I tried to backup my files for 5 hours but the phone rebooted everytime!

On one successful boot-up, I uninstalled Andromeda and while Substratum was getting uninstalled, the phone again became unresponsive and rebooted. I was later wondering if it's because of any leftovers of a theme in my system partition. The next time it booted up, I quickly went to the apps list and saw substratum was still there. I opened it and I saw a screen like this:

Reinstalled Andromeda, gave it permissions through the start_andromeda.bat, but Substratum showed the same screen. I tried the restart option, the app restarted and the same screen. Tried the rescue option, it closed the app and a toast notification "rescuing..." appeared. And the phone rebooted before anything else. Tried the last option and managed to save the log, but didn't understand most of it. Here it is:

Build version: one thousand ten Device: Lenovo K8 Note (manning) [lenovo/manning_retail/manning:8.0.0/OMB27.43-67/73:user/release-keys] ROM: 8.0.0 - Unknown Theme system: OMS (andromeda) Stack trace: java.lang.RuntimeException: Uncaught exception in Firebase Database runloop (3.0.0). Please report to firebase-database-client@google.com at com.google.firebase.database.obfuscated.zzb$1$1.run(com.google.firebase:firebase-database@@16.0.3:98) at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:869) at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:101) at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:206) at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:6784) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method) at com.android.internal.os.Zygote$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(Zygote.java:240) at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:852) Caused by: android.database.sqlite.SQLiteCantOpenDatabaseException: unknown error (code 14): Could not open database at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteConnection.nativeOpen(Native Method) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:214) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteConnection.open(SQLiteConnection.java:198) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteConnectionPool.openConnectionLocked(SQLiteConnectionPool.java:463) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteConnectionPool.open(SQLiteConnectionPool.java:185) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteConnectionPool.open(SQLiteConnectionPool.java:177) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteDatabase.openInner(SQLiteDatabase.java:833) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteDatabase.open(SQLiteDatabase.java:818) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteDatabase.openDatabase(SQLiteDatabase.java:711) at android.app.ContextImpl.openOrCreateDatabase(ContextImpl.java:726) at android.content.ContextWrapper.openOrCreateDatabase(ContextWrapper.java:299) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteOpenHelper.getDatabaseLocked(SQLiteOpenHelper.java:254) at android.database.sqlite.SQLiteOpenHelper.getWritableDatabase(SQLiteOpenHelper.java:194) at com.google.firebase.database.obfuscated.zzc.zza(com.google.firebase:firebase-database@@16.0.3:805) at com.google.firebase.database.obfuscated.zzc.<init>(com.google.firebase:firebase-database@@16.0.3:214) at com.google.firebase.database.obfuscated.zzb.zza(com.google.firebase:firebase-database@@16.0.3:171) at com.google.firebase.database.obfuscated.zzu.zzb(com.google.firebase:firebase-database@@16.0.3:156) at com.google.firebase.database.obfuscated.zzab.zza(com.google.firebase:firebase-database@@16.0.3:14130) at com.google.firebase.database.obfuscated.zzab$1.run(com.google.firebase:firebase-database@@16.0.3:94) at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Executors.java:457) at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:266) at java.util.concurrent.ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor$ScheduledFutureTask.run(ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor.java:301) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1162) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:636) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:764) User actions: 2018-11-27 12:35:07: LauncherActivity created 2018-11-27 12:35:08: SplashScreenActivity created 2018-11-27 12:35:08: SplashScreenActivity resumed 2018-11-27 12:35:08: LauncherActivity destroyed

I am not even sure yet if it's because of Substratum. But most probably Substratum is the reason as it was the only thing I was messing up with lastly. Not blaming the developers but my stupidity!

Trying to go to the recovery menu also starts the bootloop.

I seriously don't know what to do now! Can't attempt to factory reset it before backing up my files from the internal storage. And even then I am not sure if factory resetting is going to fix it or not! Can anybody please help me out? :/