Jolla White 16GB EU -Model: JP-1301 -Sailfish 1.0.2.5 [ Maadajävri (with spelling mistake) (see comment)]
Nothing is lost, except plenty of time. You need a computer which can detect RNDIS USB devices as networked hosts (and not serial line, nor a file system). Well, my laptop with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS works out of the box for that, like about any other Linux distribution.
While the non-booting Sailfish OS problem may be trivial and would be fixed in minutes if there would be just a console for a single user session, there is none here, so probably the fastest method is to use Jolla’s Recovery Boot, albeit it is not user friendly yet. But at least it contains the right ingredients for the future versions of Sailfish OS on it, taking a snapshot of the system and home file systems !
Take off the battery and put it back to get rid off the badly booting installation (soon gone forever).
- Push and hold the volume down button
- Push and hold for a while the power button until the phone vibrates, release all buttons
Boot in recovery mode, then connect the USB cable.
Settings on Ubuntu (click to read more about this platform)
Same Cyclops’ eye is looking at you, O.K. But hey, it is not exactly the same, you have just booted Jolla in Recovery Mode. Now, only thing missing is a nice application which would give you some options, but it is certainly coming… Meanwhile, you need to connect the phone to the computer with a USB cable, create a private network connection and then make a telnet connection (yes, it still exists) on 192.168.2.15 which the recovery installation OS is listening.
Once you have connected the USB cable to the waiting device, a new Ethernet device will appear. By default it is waiting for DHCP, configure it manually as 192.168.2.14.
root@clevo:~# telnet 192.168.2.15
----------------------------- Jolla Recovery v0.1 -----------------------------
Welcome to the recovery tool!
The available options are:
1) Reset phone to factory settings
2) Reboot phone
3) Exit
Type the number of the desired action and press [ENTER]:
...
[DONE] DEVICE RECOVERED!
...
That’s it. You can stop reading and start using your phone from point zero again. But if you are interested to understand why half of your phone’s memory is now used in a fresh, empty installation, how to get that memory back and how to, perhaps even to recover some of your data and settings, continue reading.
Recovery boot’s RNDIS USB device does not show up?
With dmesg(1) I saw this: [19533.731908] usb 3-1: new high-speed USB device number 13 using xhci_hcd [19533.749051] usb 3-1: New USB device found, idVendor=18d1, idProduct=d001 [19533.749059] usb 3-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [19533.749062] usb 3-1: Product: Recovery [19533.749066] usb 3-1: Manufacturer: Jolla [19533.749068] usb 3-1: SerialNumber: DU3C600365 [19533.751197] rndis_host 3-1:1.0 eth0: register 'rndis_host' at usb-0000:00:14.0-1, RNDIS device, 00:01:02:03:04:05[19533.751913] scsi8 : usb-storage 3-1:1.2 [19534.750933] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access Linux File-CD Gadget 0000 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 [19534.752474] sd 8:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0 [19534.753439] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk...
Working with snapshots after recovery
2014-11-30: * Warning * the below behavior was observed on recovery software v0.1
Later versions may and will work differently and the below will not apply.
You may find more information on some helpful comments I have received for this post.
Nice, your phone is back up again, and you can ssh(1) to it again, as nemo (reminder: the Ethernet interface over USB is not the same than that of the Recovery boot – anyway, for this type of job it is totally O.K. to connect over Wi-Fi).
Theory: Jolla (Sailfish OS) takes advantage of clever btrfs file system, which allows, not only subvolumes to be created on the fly, but also it can take snapshots of those. This feature is used in Ubuntu for a quite a while now, let’s assume that it is stable enough. It is possible to roll back a file system from a snapshot. In our case, both the rootfs and home file systems are mounted, so it is going to be somewhat difficult. But we can mount those snapshots and recover information from them. However, I suggest not to delete or modify those mounted file systems, though; it can be quite confusing on this Copy-on-Write file system. What do I know, but I will explain below how to mount those snapshots to recover files from them and then how to delete them (that’s the tricky part).
As devel-su root, let’s look what we have got, where the memory is spent and how to access those files you may want to recover by copying.
[root@jolla mnt]# btrfs subvolume list / ID 259 gen 10181 top level 5 path @swap ID 264 gen 10504 top level 5 path factory-@ ID 265 gen 10506 top level 5 path factory-@home ID 273 gen 10512 top level 5 path rec-20140104_181447_@ ID 274 gen 9766 top level 5 path rec-20140104_181447_@home ID 288 gen 10516 top level 5 path @ ID 289 gen 10481 top level 5 path @home [root@jolla mnt]# cd /mnt; mkdir tmp [root@jolla mnt]# mount -t btrfs -o subvol=rec-20140104_181447_@ /dev/mmcblk0p28 /mnt/tmp [root@jolla mnt]# du -h /mnt/tmp --max-depth=5 ... 1.6G /mnt/tmp/data/sdcard/Android/data/com.spotify.mobile.android.ui 1.9G /mnt/tmp/data ... 2.9G /mnt/tmp
Interesting, it is my Spotify music, stored by the Android application which was saved by the snapshot. Probably I do not want to recover that but some configuration files from /etc …
Below, I copy my own music from that other, @home snapshot which I have mounted on thesame mount point /mnt/tmp.
[root@jolla Music]# pwd /mnt/tmp/nemo/Music [root@jolla Music]# ls -al total 0 drwxrwxr-x 1 nemo graphics 1814 2013-12-29 00:14 . drwxr-x--- 1 nemo graphics 592 2014-01-04 12:26 .. drwxrwxr-x 1 nemo graphics 16 2012-12-15 15:50 22-Pistepirkko drwxrwxr-x 1 nemo graphics 38 2012-12-15 15:50 Adele drwxrwxr-x 1 nemo graphics 66 2012-12-15 15:50 Alice Cooper drwxrwxr-x 1 nemo graphics 40 2012-12-15 15:50 Apocalyptica ... [root@jolla mnt]# du -sh tmp 4.5G tmp
Deleting the snapshots to free the space
This is a bit tricky, I must admit. Not much information is readily available so I spent countless hours to figure this out and this is why I want to share it with you.
You need to mount the volume in another place than its original mounting point if you just want to delete snapshots in it, not to roll them back. The trick is to mount the volume so that you can see all snapshot subvolumes in that mount point.
[root@jolla mnt]# mount -o defaults,subvol=/ /dev/mmcblk0p28 /mnt/tmp [root@jolla mnt]# ls tmp @ factory-@ factory-@home @home rec-20140104_181447_@ rec-20140104_181447_@home @swap [root@jolla mnt]# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 14415852 8890692 4998076 65% / /dev/mmcblk0p28 14415852 8890692 4998076 65% / devtmpfs 415332 64 415268 1% /dev tmpfs 415852 72 415780 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 415852 1928 413924 1% /run tmpfs 415852 0 415852 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/mmcblk0p25 8100 4296 3804 54% /persist /dev/mmcblk0p28 14415852 8890692 4998076 65% /swap /dev/mmcblk0p28 14415852 8890692 4998076 65% /home /dev/mmcblk0p19 8100 4188 3912 52% /drm /dev/mmcblk0p9 48420 5492 42928 12% /var/systemlog /dev/mmcblk0p18 65488 45408 20080 70% /firmware tmpfs 415852 0 415852 0% /mnt/asec tmpfs 415852 0 415852 0% /mnt/obb /dev/mmcblk0p28 14415852 8890692 4998076 65% /mnt/tmp [root@jolla mnt]# btrfs subvolume delete /mnt/tmp/rec-20140104_181447_@ Delete subvolume '/mnt/tmp/rec-20140104_181447_@' Same thing for the home file system snapshot, let' s check after that, the situation (note that the df(1) shows that no room has been restored until you unmount the device, now mounted twice for the above operations, so don't panic). [root@jolla mnt]# ls tmp @ factory-@ factory-@home @home @swap [root@jolla mnt]# umount /mnt/tmp [root@jolla mnt]# df Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 14415852 4207440 9658520 31% / /dev/mmcblk0p28 14415852 4207440 9658520 31% / devtmpfs 415332 64 415268 1% /dev tmpfs 415852 72 415780 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 415852 1928 413924 1% /run tmpfs 415852 0 415852 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/mmcblk0p25 8100 4296 3804 54% /persist /dev/mmcblk0p28 14415852 4207440 9658520 31% /swap /dev/mmcblk0p28 14415852 4207440 9658520 31% /home /dev/mmcblk0p19 8100 4188 3912 52% /drm /dev/mmcblk0p9 48420 5492 42928 12% /var/systemlog /dev/mmcblk0p18 65488 45408 20080 70% /firmware tmpfs 415852 0 415852 0% /mnt/asec tmpfs 415852 0 415852 0% /mnt/obb
Yippee !
[root@jolla mnt]# init 6
Suspense… Success !
Thank you if you followed down here.
C ä n n e ' s N o t e b o o k 
Tuesday, February 4, 2014 at 20:35
Hah that image text, there is no spelling mistake in “maadajävri” it’s Same not Finnish.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014 at 22:01
Thanks, my bad. Indeed, learned something, but now its gone…
Saturday, February 8, 2014 at 00:00
I got my Jolla today and had to face to this isse, so thank you for this UBUNTU based description. I am an UBUNTU 13.10 64 bit user but not expert. Could you please give a bit more detailed indtuctions regarding: (1) “create a private network connection” (2) “.. DHCP, configure it manually” and (3) which one is the correct address: 192.168.2.14 or 192.168.2.15 but I read on the Jolla pages the 10.42.66.66. Than you in advance. Adam
Saturday, February 8, 2014 at 10:38
Sorry to hear that you managed so quickly brick your phone, you beat me by two days ! ;-)
I have improved the Ubuntu USB connectivity explanation in http://wp.me/a3xGT-fm
Hope that helps.
Sunday, November 30, 2014 at 11:09
Thanks for the article, it was very helpful to recover a phone earlier.
However, I’ve just tried to recover a phone yesterday, but the “Jolla Recovery” software (now v0.2.7.1) doesn’t work the same way anymore!
When you perform the reset, it creates a new subvolume first, but then deletes all of them, so you can NOT recover anything:
[…]
Delete subvolume ‘/mnt/rec-20141129_122736_@home’
Delete subvolume ‘/mnt/rec-20141129_122736_@’
Delete subvolume ‘/mnt/rec-20140714_115308_@home’
Delete subvolume ‘/mnt/rec-20140714_115308_@’
[…]
Again: The new recovery function DOES NOT LEAVE ANY BACKUPS on the phone!
Here’s the full output of the reset process (feel free to copy this to the blog/wherever you want):
https://paste.geekify.de/pmlv4qhkh
(Good news is, that you can access a shell and you should be able to mount / and /home, as well as your sdcard and make a full backup then, with ‘cp -a’ – but only try this if you know, what you are doing)
@M.P.: please add a warning to this blog article, that you should check the “Jolla Recovery” version before doing any of this.
Sunday, November 30, 2014 at 11:24
Thanks for your insight. Luckily I haven’t bricked my phone lately, now waiting for my Jolla tablet… I added the warning to the article as per your request, and a reference to your comment.