How To Recover

Pre not booting? webOS Doctor How-To

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Fortunately, Palm has created a tool called webOS Doctor intended for users to easily restore their devices in the event that they cannot boot for one reason or another.

Note: Before Trying the following steps below. Try removing the battery first and reinsert the battery and turn on the device this will determine whether or not you need to perform the following steps.

Note 2: As of WebOS 1.3.1 your USB data (Pictures, Videos, etc.) is no longer deleted during the process. Older versions of WebOS Doctor WILL DELETE ALL YOUR PERSONAL DATA ON THE DEVICE.

Palm webOS Doctor: http://ws.palm.com/webosdoctor/serialnumberinitial.htm

All Palm WebOS Doctor Versions: http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Webos_Doctor_Versions

After the download is complete, launch webOS Doctor:

1. Select you language
2. Accept the license agreement
3. Connect your Pre to you PC via USB and select "Next" when it becomes available

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After completion the device will reboot and present you with the activation set-up.

If your PC does not recognize your Pre and you cannot go past step 3 above, try the following steps:

1. With the USB cable connected, completely power off the Pre (hold down the power button until the option to power off appears)
2. Hold down the Up button on the volume rocker
3. While holding the Up button, power on the Pre
4. "Next" should now be enabled - proceed with the recovery

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The above steps will put the Pre into bootloader recovery mode and should allow the PC to recognize your device and proceed with the restore. In this mode the screen will display a giant USB logo instead of the usual Palm startup logo.

The process usually proceeds as follows:

(If you're on a Mac, you can follow the progress in /var/log/system.log, on a PC the log is in your personal temporary files area)

1. WebOS Doctor begins
2. At 3%, a ramdisk is transferred to the phone, and the phone is rebooted
3. At 4%, the screen changes to the palm logo
4. At 9%, the screen changes to a big arrow pointing down to an integrated circuit
5. Novaterm access is available from 12% onwards
6. The progress bar advances by 2% increments every 20 seconds or so
7. If it gets stuck at 52% for more than 30 seconds, it's not going to progress further and you will need to try again.
8. Around 54% the filesystems are being partitioned
9. Around 64% the modem firmware is being reflashed
10. Around 72% the carrier apps are being installed
11. Around 82% the ROM is being verified

If the process fails at 84% or later, the flash and modem have actually been written, so if you reboot you will get what you were flashing.

Doctor disconnects at 8%

If the webOS Doctor continually disconnects at 8%, then you probably have a corrupted USB drive. This is how you can fix that (note that this will completely and utterly destroy all data on the USB drive).

First put the device into recovery mode, then memboot the device using the installer uImage (extracted from your webOS Doctor jar):

novacom boot mem:// < nova-installer-image-castle.uImage 

After it boots, run novaterm:

novaterm

Once connected to the device, type:

lvm.static vgscan --ignorelockingfailure
lvm.static vgchange -ay --ignorelockingfailure

then type:

mkdosfs -f 1 -s 64 /dev/store/media

Once that completes, put the device back into recovery mode and run the webOS Doctor.

Modifications to the recovery process

Between about 18% and 54% complete, you can novaterm into the device while it is being flashed, and modify the filesystem that will be run after the phone reboots (e.g. to touch /var/luna/preferences/ran-first-use).

If you stay in a mounted directory, you can even cause the flashing to abort after the carrier apps are installed and just before the ROM is verified. This is another point where manual modifications can be made.

After you have made your modifications, unmount any filesystems you have mounted and "tellbootie reboot".

Can't boot into recovery mode?

In the very unlikely event that your Pre will not boot into recovery mode (indicating that your boot loader on the flash disk may be damaged or corrupted) you can try booting bootie into recovery mode over USB instead: Last_Resort_Emergency_BootLoader_Recovery Note that there has only been one incidence of this being required which ultimately was due to hardware failure, we do not recommend that you attempt this unless you have tried all the steps above exactly as described at least 10 times.

Short of hardware damage, it should not be possible to "brick" a Pre.