3 ms·

If you damage your bootloader, no amount of recovery partitions is going to help you. ARM SoCs are slightly different in this regard compared to PCs. On PCs, i

• userbinator 9y ago
  The MTK SoCs have an embedded boot ROM which is really read-only and can't be modified, short of physical damage; and it has enough code to act as a USB device that their flashtool can communicate with. It boots into this "download" mode if it can't find a valid partition on the eMMC or the power button is held down while being plugged into USB. It makes me wonder how the other popular smartphone SoC platforms handle this "initial format/install", because the internal storage is certainly going to have nothing on it, not even a bootloader, when first manufactured.
  • jiggunjer 9y ago
    I think they all do something similar, either via JTAG or USB. The problem is the drivers, software and ROM needed to flash the device are very confidential. My experience with the mediatek flashing software on Windows was that it looked like one of those hacker tools that generates a license key for Photoshop while installing a trojan.
    • userbinator 9y ago
      If you're referring to SPflashTool, it certainly has a very different appearance but keep in mind that it was originally a factory tool, so the programmers didn't spend much time making it "pretty" --- there's source code floating around that you can inspect and compile yourself if you're that worried.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]