TWRP on the Cat S22

General
1

I wanted to some editing on my Cat so I wanted to back things up.

I knew nothing about TWRP but I figured I’ll give it a try. So I found this XDA thread Question - TWRP for the new cat flip phone? | XDA Forums and downloaded this and flashed it.

When trying to back up my data it was all encrypted. The super’s size was 0 MB. And there wasn’t much else to back up so it was useless.

Then I tried rebooting and got stuck in TWRP bootloop. I flashed a new boot image, but it didn’t help. Then ChatGPT tried telling me I may have to reflash my ROM and potentially lose my user data.

For some reason it didn’t tell me to flash my stock recovery (which it told me to backup beforehand). I flashed the stock recovery and now it is Baruch Hashem back up and running.

I am not trying to simply share my horror story. I want user feedback and others to share their experience with TWRP on the Cat S22.

2

i tried temporalirly flashing that recovery and i got error no dtb found
i used - fastboot boot <name.img>

3

i didnt want to try flashing it permanently because im not sure if the stock recovery provided i the actual original one

4

If flashing to recovery you need to flash to recovery not boot not sure how your phone booted with no boot image

5

He ran ‘fastboot boot’ not ‘fastboot flash’

6

So nothing was even flashed i guess

7

The cat has 22 has a separate recovery partition

8

I’ve only really experimented with the qin where the recovery is built into the boot image

9

I was playing with twrp on the qin and decided to look into the cat as well. @kosherboy posted above about experiencing a recovery loop when using TWRP on the cat. He says that he reflashed stock recovery and broke the loop. There is a simple way to break the loop and still persist TWRP (requires PC).

  1. From TWRP, reboot to bootloader (fastboot). Then use this command:

  2. fastboot erase misc

  3. fastboot reboot

When you originally booted into recovery, the bootloader writes a little message (called a flag) into this partition, telling the boot process to continue to recovery instead of system. When you leave the recovery, the recovery is supposed to remove this message. This TWRP build does not. Therefore, when it tries to reboot, it thinks you want the recovery, because the message is still there. Since the bootloader comes before recovery in the boot sequence, you can still reboot to bootloader (fastboot). This is because it loads fastboot before it checks the misc partition for that flag. However, if you try to boot to system, it will check the flag first, and divert to recovery - hence, the loop. By erasing misc you remove the flag, and boot continues normally.

Important: TWRP will be overwritten by the system if it is allowed to complete a regular boot.

Another note: This TWRP is actually useless, because it fails to mount any partitions for write. So it actually can’t “recover” anything. In fact, maybe it actually tries to wipe misc, but since it cant mount partitions, it doesn’t work - that’s why there is a recovery loop. Either way, you can break the loop by erasing the misc partition, even if you don’t have a copy of the stock recovery (which you absolutely should).

10

Where were you until now :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: could really use this type of stuff here thanks for contributing

The e4810 has the same concept with fastboot

fastboot erase chkcode is necessary or it will just keep booting back to bootloader once there

11

Lol. I don’t usually have time… I just got the qin so I decided to dip back in and “learn it”. I’ll definitely pop in though.

12

@sh7411usa maybe you can get this twrp working on the new qins