well, I somehow managed to boot into the Philz recovery software after several unsuccessful stabs at pushing and holding the up-volume plus power buttons at the same time, but couldn't find a way to get into a shell to make any changes. and many other attempts either dropped me into "Factory mode", which only does anything when you hit the "Home" softkey at the bottom right, and "META mode", which apparently does nothing. you just have to disconnect the USB cable and hold the power button until it shuts down. at least that's better than the mode whose name I've already forgotten, which can only be escaped by removing the battery.
so anyway, not much progress today. I did manage to start work on a simple script that uses binwalk to help extract parts of a boot image though. something along the lines of Collake's FMK, but way less complicated and more likely to succeed.
last updated 2020-01-13 00:25:52. served from tektonic.jcomeau.com