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Help My phone just died by committing OS suicide

A

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Newbie
Alright so here's what happened:

Its a Sunday morning. I'm not a church goer but I do like my little dab of Abel in the morning.

Anywho, I'm using my phone (Acer Liquid Z320 (i know but who cares)) and my screen went black.

I'm thinking: "hey maybe my phone just had enough and wanted some sleep".

So I decide to turn it back on and my phone started up.

Pretty normal amirite? Yes and No.

My phone is now taking 15 minutes to startup which got me bamboozled.

After the startup I notice my background is now at it's factory default.

I notice that my phone is asking to link a google account to setup the phone.

My phone is asking for a new PASSWORD.

All the apps are in factory default.

I realized what just happened. My phone reset itself.

So I'm thinking hey this is not that bad right?

I stored everything on my google drive so all I lost is my app data.

Everything is going to be right? Right?

Nope.

I look at my phone memory and I see I only have 100 kb of space left (out of 8 GB) and when I uninstall all the extra factory default apps, I only have 100 mbs left even though I clearly uninstalled 300 mbs worth of apps.

I had an 16 GB SD card plugged in and I notice that there is now only a total of 4 GB available space.
Meaning that the other 12 GB is unrecognizable.

When I turn on my WiFi there is no wifi networks nearby even though there is like 15-20 networks around me.

So In Summary:
1. My Phone reseted randomly but did not erase my old data on the Hard Drive and SD Card.
2. My old data is unrecognizable and not being seen as actual data.
ex. I have 5 GB of available space on the hard drive and I used 4.5 GB of space. My phone resets but now recognizes the available space on my hard drive is 0.5 GBs instead of 5 GB
3. My wifi doesn't work. Maybe driver broke when rebooting.
4. My OS is now a potato


So what my questions are:
1. How did this happen.
2. How do I salvage it now?
3. Instead of throwing it out, can I erase everything on my phone and flash a new OS and how?

My device specs:
Phone: Acer Z320 Liquid
OS: Android 5.0.something something
How long using it: 1.5 Years
Price: $99 (probably a factor)
Social Security Number: ***Mod Redacted***
 
Well your OS isn't dead or it wouldn't boot.

You could try a factory reset, see whether that will sort out your internal storage. You hadn't encrypted the SD card by any chance? If you had then the phone wouldn't be able to read it because the key would be lost when it reset, which is the only reason I can think of for a large part of that being unreadable.
 
Thanks mr mod.
I didnt encrypt anything.
Not really experienced in the technical stuff about this but maybe the hard drive/os/or whatever created a storage partition with my old data?
 
Ill try the factory reset but if that doesnt work, then is it possible to delete everything except the bootloader or BIOS thing? And then flash a new OS?
 
Unless the bootloader is unlocked I doubt you can erase everything, but what a factory reset does is erase the /data partition (your user space). And as noted your OS (/system partition) is working or you'd not be able to boot.

It usually is possible to reflash the entire system firmware (and there's no need to erase it first, the process will overwrite each partition), but I don't know what tools that phone needs (usually manufacturer-specific) or where to find stock firmware for it.

I don't see how the system could produce an additional unrecognised partition for your old data as part of a system glitch. If you are able to install a small app called Storage Truth you could confirm that (it will tell you the size of the data partition, which for an 8GB phone should be about 4 GB, +/- 1). But I don't think that's a real possibility (and am not sure how you'd recover if it were).
 
Hadron said:
Unless the bootloader is unlocked I doubt you can erase everything, but what a factory reset does is erase the /data partition (your user space). And as noted your OS (/system partition) is working or you'd not be able to boot.

It usually is possible to reflash the entire system firmware (and there's no need to erase it first, the process will overwrite each partition), but I don't know what tools that phone needs (usually manufacturer-specific) or where to find stock firmware for it.

I don't see how the system could produce an additional unrecognised partition for your old data as part of a system glitch. If you are able to install a small app called Storage Truth you could confirm that (it will tell you the size of the data partition, which for an 8GB phone should be about 4 GB, +/- 1). But I don't think that's a real possibility (and am not sure how you'd recover if it were).
Click to expand...

Well here’s another problem. When I click on factory reset, nothing happens.
I clicked on the “Erase Everything” and nothing happened.
 
Update: I went into the boot menu and I managed to factory reset from there.
However my problem still stands.
Now I Have specific numbers:

Total Space: 8 GB
System: 7.47 GB
App: 689 MB
Available space: 8.79 MB

Now I uninstall 23 preloaded apps (Around 400 MB):

Total Space: 8 GB
System: 7.47 GB
App: 538 MB
Available space: 5.56 MB

These numbers don’t make sense.
I see all the apps that I have installed (which are all system apps) and they all total around 100-150 MB not 583 MB

Android 5.1.1 shouldn’t take that much space either.
I think because my available space is so low, Android won’t let me turn on wifi.

Factory reset doesn’t work, anything else can?
 
Excuse the low resolution lol.
 

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If the bootloader is unlocked you can erase partitions using a computer. Install a program called fastboot on it, boot the phone into fastboot (or download) mode, which you can select from the bootloader, connect to the computer via usb and then use the command "fastboot erase partition-name". But erasing the data and cache partitions is just what a factory reset does, while erasing system will just mean that your phone will no longer boot into Android (i.e. don't do that unless you have a way of reflashing it).

I with I had more faith in the system storage menu's information, but in their efforts to be "simple and user friendly" the information they present is often less than clear. Unfortunately the best way I know to get the actual partition sizes involves installing an app, which I doubt you can do at the moment.

If you have the bootloader unlocked have you made any other modifications? If by any chance you are rooted and have a terminal emulator + busybox we could use linux commands to check (just typing "df" at the command line should suffice to get the actual partition sizes). But if you've made any mods that might also be relevant to the problem.
 
I rebooted using fastboot but I don’t see anything changing still.
I realized now that when I turn off my phone, my phone factory resets itself :/

So basically everytime my phone turns off, it resets itself.
It’s basically got amnesia ;-;
 
Possibly the bootloader is corrupted if the partitions are being misunderstood - in which case you are lucky you can do anything at all.

Yeah, a firmware flash might be worth a try. That should replace everything (bootloader, recovery, ROM, radio, the lot). And hope that it's not that some part of the storage has failed.

Those error messages don't look too severe in themselves (not being able to open recovery log files in the cache partition). The question is whether they are a side-effect of something nastier.
 
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