Root [Virgin Mobile] Baseband fix

[moonknightus]

For anybody who used Kies to flash a Sprint ROM to their Virgin Mobile phone, fix for you to test.

Flash it in recovery, then restore a stock ROM.

Can't say for sure that this will fix the issue as I have never tried to flash a Sprint ROM to my phone. It's essentially a shot in the dark, but basically I've taken a DD dump or an available raw image of most mmcblk0 partitions on the phone and placed them into an updater script which writes the raw images to the appropriate partitions.

Be careful with this as it flashes partitions that are not backed up by TWRP and as such cannot be easily restored, so don't try it until you've tried everything else first!

If you want to see which partitions exactly are being overwritten, just pull apart the updater script. I tried to make it as descriptive as possible.

Good luck.

Baseband Fix V2

 

[NolenUmar]

I flashed this, being the human I am. What was the result you ask? Not relevant seeing as it wasn't for my phone and I knew that . Muahaha... I am ashamed of myself.

 

[moonknightus]

I flashed this, being the human I am. What was the result you ask? Not relevant seeing as it wasn't for my phone and I knew that . Muahaha... I am ashamed of myself.

Now I'm curious. I know you have a Sprint phone, so did it break anything when you flashed this?

 

[NolenUmar]

Nothing noticeable besides data was totally lost. Under About Device/Status everything was different. My number, prl, network etc. I flashed stock through Odin but it was no help so I reset flash counter and took it to Sprint, told them I tried the 4.1.2 update through Kies and it didn't finish that was the blame. He took it apart thinking the antenna was broken. They did 1000 factory resets to no avail then the guy did something, and boom.

 

[moonknightus]

I kinda figured it would kill data on a Sprint phone, which means that theoretically it should fix data if you flash it onto a broken VM phone.

It's likely that they used Kies to flash it over to stock. Sometimes after resetting the phone completely, it takes a few minutes (up to 15 minutes once for me) for data to come back on so that may have been why the factory resets didn't appear to do anything.

Thanks for your insight and willingness to flash anything I throw into a zip file lol

 

[NolenUmar]

Lol no problem. I practically live in the Sprint store.
Edit: oh and they didn't ever hook my phone up to anything. It never left my sight. I was VERY curious about this as after the first few resets he took it to a type of recovery I'd never seen before which is what fixed it. That proves there's a type of recovery on our phones that will restore partitions that Odin and twrp backups can't/don't... know anything about this?

 

[moonknightus]

Actually I was reading something about Odin and the partitions on the Epic 4G Touch and there was something about a recovery partition that was separate from regular recovery. Something built into the kernel maybe. I can't remember exactly. I'll see if I can find the article again.

 

[moonknightus]

Here's what I found out about my original baseband fix (for those of you who tried it and found your phone number mysteriously changed):

The EFS partition is being overwritten with a copy of my EFS partition (@NolanUmar, most likely the Sprint rep erased the EFS partition which restored your phone to working order) which fools the phone into thinking it has a different IMEI/serial number/phone number.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to fix this:

1. Download EFS Pro from here
2. Extract the archive and run the program
3. Plug in your phone when prompted
4. Select the "Restore" tab
5. Under "Restore Options," select "Format EFS"

Your phone will shut down when complete. When it turns back on, check to see if this fixes the problem.

Sorry for the confusion, I will be posting a new version of the baseband fix that omits a few partitions that were either empty, redundant, or caused problems.

 

[badbrainseddie]

Thanks for the Download in the above post. When I flashed the 1st baseband fix my number/MIN changed to 000-000-0016, /efs/meid/mps_code.dat from XAS to VMU, the esn changed to something I can't remember and the msl code wouldn't work. I played very ignorant when I spoke with Virgin Mobile and they sent me a new Victory (Got here the next day, unbelievable right?) I made sure to restore a non-rooted backup and flashed the stock recovery back as well and then a factory reset before I mailed it off to them.