[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] sasha0413:
Hi all, I am new to the forums and I think that I need some help with a custom android project.

[Background]

I have bought a Meraki MC74, This phone is a VOIP office desk phone that has a nice 7 inch LCD screen that make for a ballin' custom intercom phone/general android device.

Cisco Meraki has dropped support for this phone, so even if I wanted to pay for a subscription, I couldn't. So custom android it is :)

[So what I know]

I know that the OEM OS is android 4.X.X with a custom Cisco Meraki dialer to do Meraki's cloud mumbojumbo. I was able to use ADB and Fastboot to flash ClockworkMod, and a custom version of Android 4.1.2 to get the device somewhat working. (it had lots of bugs and problems; but it was running android free of the Cisco Dialer!)

I was able to do this with the help of fellow xdadevelopers forum user "andrewmospak" (If you're reading this; I'm the dude from Ebay. And of course, thanks bro for the help so far!)

The storage is on a 4 GB Kingston EMMC.

[What I wanted for an end goal]

I wanted to have an interesting discontinued Meraki Desk phone that runs android and get all the functions of the phone working within android.

I also wanted to expand the storage from 4GB to 32GB. ( involving de-soldering existing EMMC and solder in the bigger EMMC.)

[What caused me to write this]

I would be fine if I wanted to stop there, but I wanted to try to install a GSI of android 9 in place of 4.1.2.

Again, this wouldn't be a big deal but I had to go and screw this up. I tried to resize some of the partitions (namely system to accommodate the bigger image of the android 9 GSI)but I accidentally completely killed the system,cache, and recovery partitions. :)

So, as one of the first steps of trouble shooting, I went to the hardest solution. The de-soldering of the EMMC. :)

I reached out to Andrewmospak again and asked for a full system emmc dump to try to flash his working file system to a spare 4GB EMMC to see an example of the file system of a working android EMMC. I received the image and flashed it to a spare Toshiba chip and soldered that to the phone, but I was unable to get the phone to boot into android right away, only able to load up fastboot.

Interestingly, I know that the EMMC is working because fastboot reports the S/N as the S/N of Andrewmospak's device and not the one written on my device.

[What I don't know]

Should some of the partitions on the EMMC not be recognized by Gparted in Debian? Like the User/System and others are partitioned ext4 while others are just not recognized.

Why when trying to flash partitions using Fastboot, wont fastboot recognise a recovery partition. It would just say that the partition just doesn't exist. same story with boot.

[What needs help]

I would like to know why fastboot wont see flashable volumes when using the EMMC dump flashed to another spare Toshiba EMMC, it is clearly there.

I would like to know how to reconstruct a volume to fix missing ones, and the number of partitions android needs to run.

Would I be able to flash an image of my working device to a 32gb emmc and just expand the system and user partitions into that extra space?

I will appreciate all help given to assist me and others that want a working device instead of a paperweight. :PogChamp::fingers-crossed: