I know that a previous post of mine talks about the infamous eMMC problem where the chip will burn out, however looking over some of my notes on eMMC chip problems I did come across a couple of things I noted in regards to possibly finding a solution to a couple of the issues.

 

Now the usual way we know we have an eMMC problem is that we get:

 

E:Can’t mount /cache/recovery/command

E:Can’t mount /cache/recovery/log

E:Can’t open /cache/recovery/log

E:Can’t mount /cache/recovery/last_log

E:Can’t open /cache/recovery/last_log

 

appearing as a debug message, this is actually the full “cache” partition being corrupted. Obviously the majority of rom chefs have run into this problem many times and myself included I have seen that message on more than one occasion over different handsets.

 

Usually there isn’t a fix for any error like that, once the cache partition is corrupted you really cannot recover from that, it is a catastrophic failure. The only way I have been able to fix this a couple of times and that was by immediately removing the battery and letting it sit for a couple of minutes before putting the battery back in.

Then if you boot directly into the boot loader and hit into recovery mode.

Now if you haven’t received any major errors you cahce partition should now be formatted as ext3, so if you cycle through the menus and format it to ext4.

Do a full wipe of everything, including factory reset, davlik cache and battery stats

Flash the rom of your choice again (now make sure it is the correct rom for the phone) and hope for the best that it works.

 

Now hopefully that potentially can resolve your problems, if not then you will probably have a serious eMMC problem and potentially will have bricked your phone.

 

I will say this method has worked 9 out of 10 times with me and I still have these notes saved for the next time it occurs.

 

Key things to remember, always track changes in the rom – see if there is a good user base and check them against other more popular roms to see the differences and benefits if there are any.

There has been a lot of talk more recently that the HTC Desire S actually suffers from the major problem that the iPhone 4 had which was the Death Grip where your signal would completely drop out when you held your phone normally. I can confirm that this is partially correct – there is a lot of speculation as to what the actual problem is. I seem to see it more when you are connected to a wi-fi point where the signal will drop around 20 dbm when you move your hand across the phone. There are reports that this is also the same for the likes of your 3G & H band signals but it seems that the user case is different each time.

 

The major problem is that no one problem is the same. Some people are experiencing problems with wi-fi signals some with their GSM radio signal – the best thing to do is to monitor your findings over a long period of time, a couple of weeks to be exact so that you can see a patern and then decide on the best course of action. You will also probably be looking to install a wi-fi signal monitor that will accurately tell you the signal strength so that you can measure it at different times and with the phone in different positions. Once you find a pattern (if there is one) next you will need to do a little bit of research see if anyone running the same software as you with the same radio and model has the same problem. A lot of people seem to think it is a software problem which will lie in the radio updates, where as other think it is actually a design flaw in the phone. Especially since the main antenna is in your battery cover (little gold contacts – check them out).

 

To solve the issue is really up to yourself, there are some serious problems in identifying where the actual problem lies and you will need to do some serious research in to try and find out a solution for your problem. My gut instinct is telling me to solve the issue you will need to fully update all the software the phone is running, OS and radio. This at least  gets rid of one of the variables and leaves you with the hardware issue itself.

 

This fault has been reported on both stock and modified ROMS so be careful what you choose to flash and for the love of god make sure you flash the correct rom/radio for your specific phone. I will not be held accountable for silly mistakes you make like that – you have been warned!!

Everyone wants to run custom built roms on their phone – well any smart person does anyway! Custom built roms usually have added features like over clocking, memory management and less bloat ware than what is installed as standard.

 

Firstly to be able to flash your phone with a custom rom build you will need to find one. You will need to do some research on this one. You will need to find out what is compatible with your phone and also have an idea of what you want to achieve by making the changes.

 

Once you have your rom, and download it to your desktop you will need to rename it to “update.zip”. Next you will need to put the update.zip file onto the root directory of your SD card.

 

Turn your phone off and then boot your phone into recovery mode (fastboot needs to be disabled)

 

You will need to perform a full wipe/format and clear all the caches. These options are under the wipe option in the recovery menu.

 

Next choose “install from sdcard/zip file” and then choose the “update.zip” option from the menu.

 

Once the flash process if competed all you need to do is reboot the phone. The phone will take about 10-15 minutes to boot up after a new flash and once that is done you will need to set up your accounts again and that’s it.

When you first buy your android phone (and most probably every other phone) it will run a “radio Interface Layer” usually between the Android OS and the Radio device itself. This way they can communicate between each other so that the main functions of the phone can actually work.

 

However in some cases, and if you live a little bit on the edge then you may want to update this image with a more new up to date one. People frequently do this to avoid signal drop outs that happen to them or just general mobile phone signal problems. Majority of time these fixes are released in the next OTA update however if you are running custom builds you obviously won’t be able to get the OTA updates.

 

Now just to mark this with a disclaimer. If you actually geographically have signal problems then this will not fix them. This fix should only be performed if there is an up to date radio for your device and also if you are experiencing signal drop outs where you know there shouldn’t be. I will not be held liable for anything you follow out of this guide, you can brick your phone by incorrectly flashing the wrong radio. Make sure you are aware of the consequences if you do something wrong and that you know what you are going before you go any further.

 

1. Download the updated radio zip image
2. Place the downloaded file onto your microSD card and rename it PG88IMG.zip
3. Reboot your phone into the HBOOT menu (fastboots needs to be disabled)
4. Once in HBOOT you will be prompted if you want to flash the new image to the phone – select yes
5. After the process if complete you should just need to reboot your device and that’s it

 

Once your phone has booted (if you carried out the steps correctly) you should have a new radio image working on your phone. Once it has booted and everything is working, you will need to remove the image file from your microSD card so that it doesn’t keep trying to flash the image on every boot.

Ok so we all do it because its the only way we really wake up our HTC phones. Pressing the power button will make an interrupt to wake up the phone and take it out of sleep mode. Now the only problem is that the power button can become over-used and can become broken over time.

 

So why allow the use of the volume button to wake up the phone as well? Well from stock this option is not given, however – this can be modified and pretty simply.

 

Firstly you will want to find a file within your build called “android.policy.jar”  called KeyguardViewMediator.smali and you will want to open it with the notepad or something similar.

 

Once opened you will need the line with ” .method private isWakeKeyWhenKeyGuardShowing(I)Z” and delete the 0x18 &0x19 lines.

 

Save your edited file and repackage your build.

 

Once built flash onto your device and hopefully you should now have a phone that can be woken by using the volume buttons as well as the power buttons!

 

Happy modding!!

Usually you aren’t required to even think about the eMMC chip, what it does or what consequences a specific action has on it until you break it.

This is when things go wrong:

E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/command
E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/log
E:Can't open /cache/recovery/log
E:Can't mount /cache/recovery/last_log
E:Can't open /cache/recovery/last_log

Now luckily I’ve only ever had one failure of a chip and that was with a G1 which basically couldn’t take any of the re-building any more and just gave up. What I will say is that before you go jumping into anything regarding replacing the chip, or following another persons advice I would seriously read up on all that you can that is online. There are thousands of postings on the internet where people have had problems and been able to resolve them without having to take the phone apart and replace the chip.

Plenty of people have experienced what you are experiencing so the best port of call is to find a nice friendly forum (kind of hard to find now-a-days) and make a post detailing all of the issues.

Now what to do when you are posting all the information regarding the phone you have, model, age, firmware version. If you have adb set up on your computer – which I would expect you to have if you were flashing roms, what to do would be to enter into recovery mode, plug the phone into the PC, and open up a command prompt on the pc. Now you want to connect via adb to the device and once connected run


dmesg | grep mmc0


Now if the output contains this message:


mmc0: failed to get card ready
mmc0: reinit card
mmc0: Starting deferred resume
mmc0: Deferred resume failed


Then I’m afraid there isn’t much that can be done, if that set of messages rolls into your command window you are basically looking at getting a replacement chip. There are unfortunately no work a rounds to save you from this, no other solutions at all. Basically new phone or new chip – the choice is yours.

For the people that didn’t get that message, remember to post the output in your forum post and you may be able to save your lovely handset.