Root How does a "brick" happen?

[davidkhwang]

If you can always boot up to a bootloader like CWM, how does one permanently brick their phone? I've bricked my phone before, but was always able to recover through CWM.
Does this usually only happen to developers that are messing with the CWM files?

 

[MrB206]

Because with this phone, you don't have the safety net of the bootloader like a Motorola device... If you have a bad flash and can't get into cwm, you really will have a useless brick. I speak from experience when the phone first came out.

 

[davidkhwang]

But you can always get into CWM by pressing hardware buttons on the spectrum. How would you corrupt CWM from flashing a ROM? Aren't they two separate partitions on the phone?

 

[Neph81]

Our LG is actually very resilient, but there is a way to full brick your phone. We have 30 partitions on our phone. Partition 7 is the first partition read and tells your phone to either go to the normal boot partition, to the recovery partition, or stay in partition 7 and activate "download mode". If you mess up this partition, you will brick your phone. If you mess up anything else, you can eventually recover. I say eventually, because it will most likely mean re-flashing a .cab file and possibly manually rewriting the NVRAM, PRL, and NAM. It's the reason that we when unlock the bootloader, it does a MD5 check before flashing the partitions as we flash partition 7.

 

[jhawkkw]

CWM isn't a bootloader, its a custom recovery that replaces the recovery partition on a device. The bootloader is a separate partition from recovery. Normally a bad flash of the OS can be recovered by a backup or a successful flash, but a bad kernel flash(like one for another chipset) or deletion/bad flash of the actual bootloader can result in a perma brick. Though in many cases it can be recovered through the use of a JTAG, it is something that most people cannot do and must pay for the process to be done.

 

[Yoinx]

Our LG is actually very resilient, but there is a way to full brick your phone. We have 30 partitions on our phone. Partition 7 is the first partition read and tells your phone to either go to the normal boot partition, to the recovery partition, or stay in partition 7 and activate "download mode". If you mess up this partition, you will brick your phone. If you mess up anything else, you can eventually recover. I say eventually, because it will most likely mean re-flashing a .cab file and possibly manually rewriting the NVRAM, PRL, and NAM. It's the reason that we when unlock the bootloader, it does a MD5 check before flashing the partitions as we flash partition 7.

Wow. That's good information Neph.

I always assumed that the binaries for download mode were somehow stored on a separate chip that got activated through the button combo.

Kinda makes me wish that we had a bootloader that would let us boot of the SDcard (like my nooks do). It's a shame that something like cyanoboot couldn't get made for this hardware. Yeah Yeah. I understand how hard it is to make a boot loader, especially when they don't release the original one's code