Last Resort Emergency BootLoader Recovery
Recovery Mode
Typically, any damage to the operating system on the Palm Pre/Pre Plus can be recovered by booting into recovery mode. (How_To_Recover)
One situation which cannot be recovered so easily is the extremely unlikely event of corruption of the installed bootloader (bootie) stored on the Pre's flash disk.
If bootie on the flash disk has been damaged or corrupted in such a way that booting into recovery mode is not possible, the Pre is still not "bricked" as the OMAP3430 processor in the Pre provides for a mechanism to boot code from its USB interface. At this time this operation has not been performed on a Pixi, and will not be the same as it has a different core.
NVRAM Tokens
If the NVRAM partition gets trashed too, the token area will be empty and the doctor will refuse to install. If you're in this situation you need to rebuild it. Here are a few of the minimal token sets to allow the doctor to start:
Sprint Pre: DMCARRIER=Sprint, DMMODEL=P100EWW, HWoRev=A, KEYoBRD=z, PN=180-10642-05, PRODoID=P100EWW, installer=trenchcoat
GSM Pre: DMCARRIER=ROW, DMMODEL=castle, HWoRev=A, PN=180-10722-03, PRODoID=P100UEU
Verizon Pre Plus: DMCARRIER=Verizon, DMMODEL=P101EWW, HWoRev=A, KEYoBRD=z, PN=180-10724-01, PRODoID=P101EWW, installer=trenchcoat
Verizon Pixi Plus: DMCARRIER=Verizon, DMMODEL=P121EWW, HWoRev=A, KEYoBRD=z, PN=180-10714-01, PRODoID=P121EWW, installer=trenchcoat
Sprint Pixi: DMCARRIER=Sprint, DMMODEL=P200EWW, HWoRev=A, KEYoBRD=z, PN=180-10714-03, PRODoID=P200EWW, installer=trenchcoat
If you want BlueTooth and Wifi to work, You may also want to set BToADDR=00:1D:FE:xx:yy:zz, WIFIoADDR=00:1D:FE:uu:vv:ww and PalmSN=serial. If you are unsure of your original MAC addresses, They can safely be any random number, the serial number is on the box and on a sticker inside the battery compartment.
Token Backup
If you are a heavy experimenter, you should probably backup your tokens before you start experimenting, this way you can easily recover a future problem without as much hassle. Also, there are tokens that control thinks like touchscreen calibration, so these cannot be easily obtained if they are lost! Once booted, you can backup all your tokens by copying everything in /tmp/tokens. Here are a list of the Tokens on an Average Pre:
ACCELCAL BToADDR DMCLoAUTHPW DMSETS HWoRev PN ProdSN BATToCH DMCARRIER DMCLoNONCE DMSVRoAUTHPW KEYoBRD PRODoID WIFIoADDR BATToRSP DMCLoAUTHNAME DMMODEL DMSVRoNONCE ModemSN PalmSN installer
OMAP boot Procedure
First, ensure that the Linux SDK and novacom packages are installed, as you will need to run webOS Doctor as the final step in this process. Second, ensure that you have a copy of the webOS doctor jar ready for your phone.
Download: omap3_usb.tar.bz2. If you have not libusb 0.1.3 installed on your computer, install it. It is needed for the header file /usr/include/usb.h
Compile on Linux system with "make". Optionally install with "sudo cp omap3_usbload /usr/local/bin"
Now extract the bootie binary from a WebOS Doctor image: (note: webosdoctor file name will vary)
mkdir doctor; cd doctor; unzip ../webosdoctor.jar; cd resources mkdir webOS; cd webOS; tar xvf ../webOS.tar; mkdir nova-cust-image-castle.rootfs; cd nova-cust-image-castle.rootfs tar xvzf ../nova-cust-image-castle.rootfs.tar.gz ./boot/boot.bin; cd boot
Booting bootie over USB:
Ensure USB is unplugged from the Pre, and remove the Pre's battery.
On your Linux system, run:
sudo omap3_usbload boot.bin
This should return:
TI OMAP3 USB boot ROM tool, version 0.1 ......
and a series of dots while it looks for an OMAP3 to send boot code to.
Now, plug the pre into USB.
If all works as it should, the usbload program should return:
found device! download ok
And your Pre will now show a USB logo. (this is bootie's "Recovery mode")
Put the battery back in without unplugging the USB.
Since you are now in USB recovery mode, you should be able to run the webOS doctor on the host Linux box. Remember that the SDK novacom package must be installed for the webOS Doctor to work in Linux.
One way to do this is to launch the doctor from the command line like:
sudo java -jar webosdoctor.jar
And follow the usual steps to recover your pre's operating system from here.
Alternative Recovery
Another available option now that bootie is running is to send bootie a Linux image over USB and perform some kind of recovery work directly on the pre itself. This is not recommended unless you are very familiar with linux systems administration.
First you send bootie the boot image of the doctor's installer. This can be extracted from the WebOS Doctor jar.
novacom boot mem:// < nova-installer-image-castle.uImage
Wait 15 seconds for the system to boot then connect in to a shell on the running linux system with novaterm. (you will see no on-screen indication that the device is booting linux, only a solid Palm logo)
novaterm
You should get a shell prompt
root@palm-webos-device:/#
Now find and activate the LVM disk voumes with the following two commands:
lvm.static vgscan --ignorelockingfailure lvm.static vgchange -ay --ignorelockingfailure
Next, mount all disks
for N in root var media log update; do mkdir /mnt/$N; mount /dev/mapper/store-$N /mnt/$N; done
When done with whatever you need to do on the system, shutting it down safely is a good idea
umount -a; tellbootie reboot
Recovery using OS/X
For a Mac, the process of running USB booting the OMAP may be much simpler.
The MacOS X version of the SDK provides a pre-built executable /opt/nova/bin/cpuboot and a recovery image. You can simply run
/opt/nova/bin/cpuboot -o -v -d usb -f /opt/nova/bin/recovery-castle.bin