My Tecno Spark 10 Pro (MediaTek Helio G88, Android 12) bootlooped after a banking app froze. Now it boots straight into stock recovery with the message that Android cannot be loaded and data may be corrupt. The bootloader is unlocked. I hooked it up to an Android tablet via OTG with Bugjaeger. The device uses A/B partitioning and was running on slot b. I switched it to slot a via fastboot, but slot a gives the exact same recovery loop, so the issue is clearly a corrupted userdata partition failing to mount during early init. All I need is my local KeePass database file from internal storage. I know modern Android uses File-Based Encryption with keys sealed in the TEE, but since my bootloader is unlocked, is there any known way via fastboot, MTK tools, or custom boot images to extract or decrypt that single file before I wipe the device? Or is it completely unrecoverable once the filesystem fails to mount?

My Tecno Spark 10 Pro (MediaTek Helio G88, Android 12) bootlooped after a banking app froze. Now it boots straight into stock recovery with the message that Android cannot be loaded and data may be corrupt. The bootloader is unlocked. I hooked it up to an Android tablet via OTG with Bugjaeger. The device uses A/B partitioning and was running on slot b. I switched it to slot a via fastboot, but slot a gives the exact same recovery loop, so the issue is clearly a corrupted userdata partition failing to mount during early init. All I need is my local KeePass database file from internal storage. I know modern Android uses File-Based Encryption with keys sealed in the TEE, but since my bootloader is unlocked, is there any known way via fastboot, MTK tools, or custom boot images to extract or decrypt that single file before I wipe the device? Or is it completely unrecoverable once the filesystem fails to mount?

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      you mean it

      • tries to boot android, fails and goes to recovery?
      • or it doesn’t even show the boot animation and just hangs on fastboot? or reboots immediately?

      i’ll need details to help…

        • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
          0·
          26 days ago

          ok. in that case you can unpack that boot image, edit default.prop in ramdisk like i mentioned above and try fetching logcat.

          i’m away from my workstation for a while so i can’t edit the boot image for you now. you can try it yourself, or if its fine please wait a few weeks

            • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
              0·
              13 days ago

              sorry for keeping you wait for so long. please try downloading this boot.img file and booting it. i’ve modified the original boot.img’s default.prop to enable ADB.

              boot that using fastboot boot tecno-ki7_boot_adb.img, and right after that run sudo dmesg -w to see any new USB device appearing. Also open another terminal and try adb devices, adb shell etc and see if you can communicate with the device while it’s in the boot animation stage.

              if the new boot.img i provided doesn’t work please let me know, we might need to nullify vbmeta

              • lipen@reddthat.comOPEnglish
                0·
                1 day ago

                Hey! I found a little bit of time to try it out! Thank you very much for trying to help me! When I trying to boot it up I getting:

                fastboot boot tecno-ki7_boot_adb.img
Sending 'boot.img' (26862 KB)                      OKAY [  0.655s]
Booting                                            FAILED (Status read failed (No such device))
fastboot: error: Command failed

                and logs from dmesg: https://0bin.ch/?51a49ed0a5778a18#DPxaTLsafGXC2jEokDCF5mZ2YiexKJHoYkz7GCthwMNa Also adb devices and adb shell does nothing.

                • hexagonwin@lemmy.todayEnglish
                  0·
                  1 day ago

                  hmm that’s weird.

                  after the fastboot boot command fails, what does the device show on screen? is it stuck on fastboot? or reboots?

                  perhaps doing fastboot boot as sudo might help.

                  did you install fastboot from your linux distro’s repo? what version is it? (it might be very outdated and be the cause of issues)

                  • lipen@reddthat.comOPEnglish
                    1·
                    21 hours ago

                    After fastboot command device reboots and trying to start android, I think and then just shows me error screen again. Yeah, I tried sudo, but didn’t help. I tried 37.0.0 version too and result the same. Idk this phone is cursed.