Flashing recovery using dd on a soft-bricked Asus New Padfone Infinity (A86) - Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hello,
I soft-bricked my Padfone A86 when I tried to flash my own kernel using TWRP 2.7.1.1. Before that I was running a rooted Android 5.0.2 (fw version WW-12.4.0.59) with TWRP recovery that I installed like described in an article at padfoneclub.com.
Installing the custom ROM damaged (at least) the boot and recovery partitions. That means I only have access to fastboot which I can not use to flash to those partitions:
Code:
fastboot flash recovery twrp-2.7.1.1-unofficial.img
target reported max download size of 1879048192 bytes
sending 'recovery' (10124 KB)...
OKAY [ 0.321s]
writing 'recovery'...
FAILED (remote: Security is Enable, close 'flash' function !!)
finished. total time: 0.338s
The remote: Security is Enable, close 'flash' function !! error must have been introduced by a patch to the bootloader because I don't recall having this issue when I first flashed TWRP back then when I was running some previous firmware version.
What I can do though is to boot the boot.img (only from fw versions 10.12.3.116 and 10.12.3.130) like this: fastboot boot boot.img
Using saferoot I managed to get root access which enables me to write to the recovery and boot partitions like this:
Code:
dd if=/sdcard/twrp-2.7.1.1-unofficial.img of=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/recovery bs=4096; sync;
Although I can confirm that the memory gets changed using the dd command the bootloader neither loads recovery nor the system on the boot partition.
I looked at a hexdump of the recovery partition and it seems like the only thing stored in it is the TWRP image followed by zeroes. Trying different block sizes didn't help neither.
Confusingly that method seemed to work for some people. Maybe TWRP requires to be written over some stock recovery and can't boot on its own?
I was only able to try to flash the stock recovery for fw versions above 10.12.3.13 as ASUS only included patch-files for the recovery partition before. That didn't work neither. I was assuming that the recovery is running on its own and does not depend on being the same version as the system (or the bootloader). Or might there be something on a different partition that prevents the recovery from working properly?
Booting into recovery results in getting into fastboot mode (fastboot continue doesn't help).
Booting the system stops at the bootloader which shows the error message: ERROR: Can not load Invalid boot image!!
The frustrating thing is that although I seem to have full access to the device memory I still don't manage to fix the recovery partition.
Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

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Thunder Storm said:
Hello,
I soft-bricked my Padfone A86 when I tried to flash my own kernel using TWRP 2.7.1.1. Before that I was running a rooted Android 5.0.2 (fw version WW-12.4.0.59) with TWRP recovery that I installed like described in an article at padfoneclub.com.
Installing the custom ROM damaged (at least) the boot and recovery partitions. That means I only have access to fastboot which I can not use to flash to those partitions:
Code:
fastboot flash recovery twrp-2.7.1.1-unofficial.img
target reported max download size of 1879048192 bytes
sending 'recovery' (10124 KB)...
OKAY [ 0.321s]
writing 'recovery'...
FAILED (remote: Security is Enable, close 'flash' function !!)
finished. total time: 0.338s
The remote: Security is Enable, close 'flash' function !! error must have been introduced by a patch to the bootloader because I don't recall having this issue when I first flashed TWRP back then when I was running some previous firmware version.
What I can do though is to boot the boot.img (only from fw versions 10.12.3.116 and 10.12.3.130) like this: fastboot boot boot.img
Using saferoot I managed to get root access which enables me to write to the recovery and boot partitions like this:
Code:
dd if=/sdcard/twrp-2.7.1.1-unofficial.img of=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/recovery bs=4096; sync;
Although I can confirm that the memory gets changed using the dd command the bootloader neither loads recovery nor the system on the boot partition.
I looked at a hexdump of the recovery partition and it seems like the only thing stored in it is the TWRP image followed by zeroes.
Confusingly that method seemed to work for some people. Maybe TWRP requires to be written over some stock recovery and can't boot on its own?
I was only able to try to flash the stock recovery for fw versions above 10.12.3.13 as ASUS only included patch-files for the recovery partition before. That didn't work neither. I was assuming that the recovery is running on its own and does not depend on being the same version as the system (or the bootloader). Or might there be something on a different partition that prevents the recovery from working properly?
Booting into recovery results in getting into fastboot mode (fastboot continue doesn't help).
Booting the system stops at the bootloader which shows the error message: ERROR: Can not load Invalid boot image!!
The frustrating thing is that although I seem to have full access to the device memory I still don't manage to fix the recovery partition.
Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try getting rid of the bs part. Flash the image at it's normal size.
Sent from my XT1609 using Tapatalk

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Thanks for your reply.
I flashed both TWRP and stock recovery without the bs parameter. Same results as before: it doesn't boot into recovery.