When updates go wrong

Associate
Joined
16 Aug 2011
Posts
1,569
Location
Ireland
Hey all - just thought I'd share what happened to me last night (and sorry for the essay in advance lol)-

Some background info - I've currently got an xperia t out with o2 and have been checking quite frequently on any information on the 4.3 android update (sony released it and just had to wait until o2 did their thing :-/) any-ways - couldn't find any information on an eta for it and then yesterday out of the blue an OTA update came through :D went from 4.1.2 to 4.3 - UI has changed, some new features - feels like a new phone - well it feels like a new phone now, felt like a brick after the initial update.
When the update installed I went to the about phone page and tried to take a screen shot (was going to sent it to a mate as I'd been talking about the 4.3 update the previous weekend), took a minute to find out cough*google*cough how to take a screen shot as they'd changed it from the previous version (I just had to hold in the power/lock button and it would load up a menu with functions I could use, one being screen shot - whereas now its hold power and down :) ), but encountered my first bug - unable to save screen-shot as memory may already be in use, restarted phone and same issue - okay I think, not a deal breaker and I'l have a look for a fix later, then I tried to view my images on the widget as they didn't seem to load - and encountered a second error - "Unfortunately, the process android.process.media has stopped." - click okay and it would pop up again and again and again - had to restart my phone to get rid of this - and it happened every-time I tried to access my memory, had a look around and found a few solutions - clear cache, disable and enable download manager and a few others, nothing worked and this process kept failing - getting fed up I decided to do a clean install (btw after a few attempts I removed my micro-sd card and still got the same problem), sd card was removed and this thankfully had almost all my data on it - only a few photos on my phone- I was also unable to connect to my pc as every-time I did the process.android.media would stop working - so wouldn't show up on the pc, decided to bite the bullet and reinstall - learn to back up in the future.
The phone came as stock with ICS but the restore to factory defaults somehow restored itself to 4.3? Wasn't expecting this - thought it would have reverted to ICS. It also didn't delete the photos that were stored on the phone itself (only about 6-7 so I thankfully wasn't going to lose much but had expected them to be deleted all the same), alls working fine now thankfully and as I said early on it feels like getting a new phone lol Lesson learned I guess - keep a bloody backup - I had one ages ago but lost it just after christmas when I go an SSD and fresh installed windows - was meant to back it up again but never got around to it....as always eh,

thanks for reading and feel free to comment :)
 
Best thing to do after an OTA update is a hard reset via recovery boot. Its sounds complicated but its not. OTA was only ever supposed to be for small incremental updates not huge changed to firmware (4.1 to 4.3 is a massive jump in software). The cache would have needed wiping as that's not done OTA files mixed on the cache is the biggest cause of FC errors with Android OS
 
How do you do a hard reset via recovery boot?
Is selecting factory reset in settings the same thing?
 
What phone do you have? Depending on your device, its usually holding the volume up whilst powering on the device. Its usually one of the first options in recovery.

Factory reset won't wipe the data partition, that holds all the settings as well as your files, resetting the settings is one of the biggest must do's!
 
I have a Galaxy S2 but expect a (an?!) Xperia SP tomorrow. I believe it may have a 4.1 to 4.3 upgrade available. Would be good to do the upgrade the right way before spending time setting up the phone.
 
The phone came as stock with ICS but the restore to factory defaults somehow restored itself to 4.3? Wasn't expecting this - thought it would have reverted to ICS.

It can only restore the OS that's installed on the device at the time, ICS is gone. It's the equivalent of doing a clean install on a PC.

I have a Galaxy S2 but expect a (an?!) Xperia SP tomorrow. I believe it may have a 4.1 to 4.3 upgrade available. Would be good to do the upgrade the right way before spending time setting up the phone.

Yes.
 
I had tried the hard reset (holding power and up) and it didnt fix the issue so just went for a factory reset - glad I did - phone is a lot smoother and more responsive atm.

TheVoice - ahh see I had imagined it would have reset to ICS - and that it would have to re-update to 4.3, any reason on why my handful of photographs survived the restore to factory settings?
 
I had tried the hard reset (holding power and up) and it didnt fix the issue so just went for a factory reset - glad I did - phone is a lot smoother and more responsive atm.

TheVoice - ahh see I had imagined it would have reset to ICS - and that it would have to re-update to 4.3, any reason on why my handful of photographs survived the restore to factory settings?

It only wipes the internal memory, anything on the SD card is untouched.
 
Ah ha - I didnt have an sd card inserted though - removed it when I thought it may have been that causing the error, I'm by no means complaining but just somewhat curious lol :)
 
Ah ha - I didnt have an sd card inserted though - removed it when I thought it may have been that causing the error, I'm by no means complaining but just somewhat curious lol :)

Some phones partition the internal memory so it acts/appears as an SD card.
 
Back
Top Bottom