Help with Umi iron please

TOREK

\n\nHi all i am hoping someone can help me out,
My son has an umi iron which he has some how soft bricked, by soft bricking i mean that he can boot it in to recovery menu , where you choose recovery mode, fastboot ect but thats all, he has tried recovering his phone using the recovery mode but it has failed, so he wants to try and flash a std stock rom to reset his phone, he has tried downloading fastboot and using that but it states that the bootloader must be unlocked and here is the problem, it seems that as default the boot loader is set to not allow unlocking which must changed within the phone settings which is great if you can get into the phone to change it but really crap if you cant, so my question here is,
1, is it possible to flash a stock rom without unlocking bootloader.
2, can you unlock the bootloader by any other means
3, can someone please tell us the best way to to get his phone working agian, we are not worriewd about personal information or back ups as the phone is not working at the moment and we just want the phone back to being usable.

a list of tools and programs need and some instruction on what to do would be great.

cheers in advance

bencebacsi

Dear TOREK,

You still can unbrick your phone by flashing a stock ROM with SP Flash Tool. Please, refer to this page. You can find there a link for the stock ROM as well as for a guide for SP Flash Tool.
You always can find the latest SPFT version HERE and a working VCOM driver HERE
That's not needed but you can unlock the bootloader by extracting the boot.img in the firmware folder and edit the default.prop file. You have to set the line ro.secure=0 if that was =1. Here's a tool and guide for unpacking and repacking: LINK

Regards,
Bence

Nadridan

Hi Bence,

I'm having the same problem and have attempted to follow the instructions above but SPFT does not appear to recognise the scatter files in the official rom. I hae tried roms from rootjoy and from the official site but all of them are bringin up an error message saying scatter file is illegal. Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Nadridan

bencebacsi

\n\n

Nadridan replied at 2015-10-7 06:10
Hi Bence,

I'm having the same problem and have attempted to follow the instructions above but SPFT  ...

Hi Nadridan,

I checked now but the scatter file as well as the whole content of the firmware folder is okay. Do you use the latest version of SPFT? That's the v5.1532.
After loading the scatter file, you should see this.

TOREK

Thanks for trying to help BB
I have tried to follow the guide for flashing with SPFT however we cannot actually turn our phone on properly as it gets stuck in a bootloop and doesn't get past the android logo when starting, we can boot into the recovery menu where you can choose recovery , fastboot ect but that's all we can do. we did try a recovery but it returned as failed, I cant remember the exact error, I have installed SPFT and got to the stage as shown on your screen shot, I have downloaded a driver that I thought was pdanet but it was very confusing as to what to actually install it was called the complete pdnet+adb drivers or something so I will try again with the link in the post you mentioned above, however the vcon link is dead and google returned a page unavailable error , if we boot into fast boot and flash over a recovery.img from the rom downloaded from here. should we then be able to try and use a recovery boot up ?

Nadridan

Hi Bence,

I am delighted to tell you we have managed to fix the device!! thank you for your help and pointing us in the right direction. However, i would like to point out that in the guide it says just connect your device to the computer and with the iron this does nothing (As Torek stated). you need the hold the VOL DOWN button for the SPFT to recognise the phone (I only tried this as i remembered doing it when flashing my old sony phone) its a simple thing to miss but it may be the difference between someone fixing their phone and not. Once again many thanks for your help

Nadridan

bencebacsi

TOREK replied at 2015-10-7 19:03
Thanks for trying to help BB
I have tried to follow the guide for flashing with SPFT however we cann ...

I just checked the links now and all of them work properly. Here's another link for the VCOM driver. VCOM link
MediaTech devices (so neither the Iron) don't support fastboot mode. You can choose it from the boot menu but that probably boots into meta mode what you don't need. I don't have a UMI Iron in hand.

bencebacsi

Nadridan replied at 2015-10-8 10:46
Hi Bence,

I am delighted to tell you we have managed to fix the device!! thank you for your help an ...

Hi Nadridan,

That's interesting what you say since normally, pressing the vol-down button is needed only if you flash without battery. However, at newer MTK phones that option has never worked at me. Moreover, I've never met an MTK phone that could be flashed with battery inside and pressing any button while connecting to USB. I don't have an Iron in hand, so I couldn't check it but maybe you processed a 'without battery' flashing somehow.
The point is that, you were successful finally.

Regards,
Bence

TOREK

Hmm that's interesting what you say about fastboot, Can you explain how I have used fast boot commands on the umi iron and it has responded, we booted into what we think is fast boot and type the fastboot devices ect and got a response from the phone , we also tried the fsatboot oem unlock ect and although we couldn't unlock the bootloader we did get a response from the phone and fastboot program that indicated that fastboot was indeed connected and trying to work,

bencebacsi

I couldn't try it, so I don't know. I've got an eMax what uses a SoC of the same family. My phone is not able to boot into fastboot mode or to accept fastboot commands in any states. Beside that I've never met a mediatek phone with fastboot capability. Maybe your phone is a new exception. If you iron has fastboot capability, it should be able to boot in to fastbood from the running android system by the adb reboot fastboot command. Moreover, you should be able to flash the recovery, boot and system partitions by fastboot commands. I checked it and the bootloader is unlocked in the 1.6 version.