[G1 Android Development] jessejoe:
Hopefully helpful to somebody

This is just a story of my difficult upgrade to BiffMod 2.0.1. Nothing was the fault of the Mod; I just ran into some problems that should not have been, and got stuck. I'm posting this in case it helps somebody down the line - it took me a few hours to solve this problem.

Problems in brief:

Phone would freeze within a few hours of boot

Phone would sometimes freeze during boot

Swap did not work

Installing applications kept failing

I followed the OP instructions to upgrade from BiffMod1.8 to 2.0.1 with just two exceptions:

- I kept my swap partition at 128MB

- I kept Clockwork recovery instead of Amon RA. I did all of the equivalent wipe and reformat actions using ADB where Clockwork could not.

Upon first boot of BiffMod 2, things went well. I allowed application moving, turned on JIT, turned on Swap, turned off Compcache, etc etc. Then I rebooted, flashed gapps in recovery, and booted up.

Twice I followed this pattern and got instability starting on the first boot with Gapps. The first time through it froze halfway through sync. The second time it froze on booting to the desktop.

I'd never used a Pershoot kernel before, so on try #3 I flashed in dumpfuq's OC614 kernel which I had been using before. No change.

On try number 4 I got bright and thought maybe my swap partition was hosed. So I left Compcache on and left swap off.

Things got much better. Yay! I told myself I'd go home and pull the card,

parted

my swap down to 64M (since I wanted to anyways) and re-make swap (

mkswap

from ADB). But about halfway through restoring my apps with Titanium, things got strange again.

Unable to resist messing with it, I dropped into recovery,

parted

'd the swap down to 64M, rebooted recovery to make sure the kernel noticed, and ran mkswap. Told me it'd made 128M of swap. Uh oh. Tried again. Overflow errors from mkswap.

Crud. Good thing I keep backups :)

By now between that and that Titanium's attempts to restore had caused so many issues (reading and writing SD, after all) I was sure my SD card was corrupt. I blanked it (

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcblk0

) for one last hurrah, and tried repartitioning from recovery. No dice.

At this point a friendly coworker (I work in IT) reminded me that my mac laptop could repartition if I let it completely rebuild the partition tables. I figured I'd try, and sure enough the Mac partitioned the sdcard just fine.

See, by now I was starting to understand what was happening. :o

Kicking myself, I made one big FAT partition on the SD card with the Mac, put Amon Ra on it, and used adb to make that the recovery image. This worked fine.

So I reboot recovery, Amon Ra recovery comes up, and I partition my SD card properly. I push the install files onto the SD card. Install goes smoothly. Sync goes well. I am happy as can be. Problem solved, in time for a Friday night movie.

In case you hadn't caught on, the issue was that Clockwork recovery was doing rude things to my SD card. Like not running

mkfs

or

fdisk

properly. This is new behavior and I'm pretty sure it was just a broken recovery, not Clockwork's fault. But it was the problem in the end, as replacing that recovery fixed all of these problems.

The moral of this story? Who knows... Don't trust your recovery. Follow the dang instructions. Try *everything* before you get desperate.

Just a story of things going well until I tried to get creative.

--

Fakesig:

T-Mobile G1 (Dream)

BiffMod 2.0.1/Amon Ra 1.7.0/DangerSPL

Sandisk Class 6 8GB - 6G FAT/1G Ext4/64M swap/remainder blank