With Android’s Developer Settings, it’s possible to add an option to the Power menu for restarting in “recovery” mode (from the booted OS), as an easy alternative to power off + press-a-certain-physical-key combination to boot into recovery for flashing a custom ROM.
(1) I was wondering if any devs (or anyone else here who might know) would comment on the viability of creating something similar for entering flash mode on the L5.
(2) An easier alternative to the current flashing procedure, one that could be initiated from an app in phosh would be nice, too.
Yes i know your rare issue on entering flash mode via button, but looks if Purism performing flash mode via Aplication the result will same as before. I not 100 sure what firmware management flash mode on L5 to reinstall it i guess it is Uboot, you can try reinstall it and try again. There are some virus like pegasus and others who also do this type of behavior
Good suggestion. Sorry, well beyond my pay grade to know whether it is possible.
Obviously the existing mechanism for getting into Serial Download mode needs to remain possible - for when a phone’s eMMC drive contents are actually borked.
That is always going to be tricky since you are attempting to nuke in its entirety the content of the eMMC drive, while booted from it (and booted read-write too).
Maybe this is possible by messing around with the contents of /boot and then doing a normal reboot - let’s say where you have already downloaded and positioned the disk image on the phone. But NB the /boot partition is not itself even close to large enough to hold a disk image.
I guess it could be possible to do this with a non-borked phone by … booting from µSD card and then using dd (or equivalent) etc. to overwrite the eMMC drive (if you had a documented procedure to follow).
Can you currently boot from µSD card? I realise that there’s a fair hassle to set that up, particularly if you are actually using the card for something else currently. I’m not suggesting that you go ahead and reflash that way but it would be good to know whether you can even boot from µSD card.
