[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] thrimbor:
Hello there,

I'm trying to fix or at least diagnose the issue of my bricked Huawei Ascend Y530. The problems with it started quite a while ago, so I'll try to summarize what happened as best as I can remember.

Backstory​

I used to actively use this Y530-U00 years ago, but put it in a drawer when I switched to a Mate 7, and then later to a Poco X3. Then, something like two years ago, I wanted to use my old Y530 for something (I don't even remember what for), but when i turned it on, it didn't boot. Instead, I got the message "Boot image verify failed! Please update to the authorized images.".

I wasn't able to find the exact image I needed (german Y530-U00), but I figured the only difference should be which cell frequencies it tries to use, so I went with another ROM (don't remember which one, but it was for the Y530-U00). I put the files on a micro SD card, let the phone flash, and when it turned off, it was completely dead.

I didn't get a charging light, no charging display animation, no reaction to any of the buttons.

The phone appeared completely dead, but when I plugged it into my PC, it showed a USB device with a 0x9008 product ID.

I found out that this is some kind of emergency flashing mode called EDL and requires usage of a tool called QFIL, but I couldn't find the files this tool required me to supply, so I gave up.

Second try​

Two weeks ago or so I stumbled across a Python-based tool called edl (https://github.com/bkerler/edl). It looked quite promising, being able to dump and flash individual partitions as well as full images, came with loaders and was usable on Arch Linux (which is the main OS on all my devices here).

I still didn't find a german Y530-U00 image (all links seem to be dead), so I went with the Canadian one, extracted it, and, after creating dumps of what was on the phone, flashed the individual partitions. However, the phone's behavior didn't change at all, and after dumping the partitions, I noticed that they (especially BOOT) differed from the images I tried to flash (I used vbindiff to check). The edl tool, when quitting, printed an "Error: {}", but I didn't know whether that indicated that there were no errors, or an unknown error. The tool did take ~30 hours to complete flashing.

I now suspected that the eMMC might be broken and just not accepted the data, but it also could've been a problem with the edl tool I used.

I did manage to find an old version of QFIL (1.0.0.3 I believe) and the XML files that should work for my phone (I can't find the USB flash drive with them on it, but if I find it again I'll post them here), and used it on Windows to flash the same image, but I got the same result. QFIL didn't display any error though.

​

What I'm looking for​

Is there UART on the phone, and could it help me get error messages or further diagnose the phone? I poked at the exposed test pads with my oscilloscope, but all I found were two 1.8V pads that briefly showed a 2.5kHz clock signal while powering on that didn't look like serial output at all. I know there are phones that provide UART over the TRRS jack when applying 3.3V to the mic pin, but I don't feel like this is safe to just try on a phone that might not support this.

Is there a way to reliably check whether the eMMC is bad while only EDL mode is available? I tried to flash an all-zero image to BOOT with the edl tool but it did that weird "Error: {}" thing again, and I don't know whether that's a proper failure coming from the eMMC or a bug.

The chip in the phone is an SK Hynix H9TP32A4GDDC, which appears to be a chip that combines NAND flash and LPDDR2 RAM. Is there a compatible (but maybe more reliable) chip that I could put in instead?

I saw diagrams showing pads that exposed some of the eMMC signals. How hard is it to directly access the storage, bypassing the phone (I have SD card readers and a first-gen raspberry Pi available)?

Is there any other info out there that might help me and I didn't see? Schematics, images, tools (all I saw was sketchy websites wanting money)?

A second, working Y530 would probably be good to verify stuff, but I don't have one.

Lastly, I know that this phone is old and not worth much anymore. I'm not trying to fix it to use it as my main phone, I'm mainly itching to know what is defective. And if it can be fixed, and I maybe can screw around with postmarketOS on it, all the better.

Thanks in advance!