Tuesday, June 17, 2014

How to Fix a Motorola Moto-G XT-1034 that is having no sim, or radio turned off issues after receiving the 4.4.2 OTA update

I had purchased a Consumer Cellular Motorola Moto-G for my wife to use as a replacement for her Samsung Galaxy Nexus which had started developing issues with the radio stopping working until the phone was rebooted. These issues were getting more and more frequent so it was time for a replacement.

I got the phone then got CC to unlock it for me as my wife didn't want to switch her cell service to them. I then unlocked the boot loader thru motorola and proceeded to flash the phone with the retail 4.4.2 rom available from the http://sbf.droid-developers.org website for the Moto G.

After doing this the phone was no longer able to recognize that a sim card was inserted, and attempts to reflash the rom did nothing.

Well I was desperate and with the bootloader unlocked I couldn't get any kind of warranty from Motorola, so I decided to experiment with flashing different modems from other versions in the hope that I could fix the issue.

after flashing the 4.4.2 radio from the Retail GB (Great Britain) rom and then restarting the phone, it was able to again recognize that there was a sim installed, and it's working.

I have packaged up a zip file with the needed files to flash a XT-1034 Moto-G with this radio and I'm sharing them here for anyone who is having this issue from the OTA update and is willing to try this before giving up on their phone.

to use this you must have a unlocked bootloader, if your bootloader is not unlocked I strong urge you to try to get the phone replaced thru Motorola, as you should have a full year of warranty and they should be willing to advance rma you a replacement phone before you send them back the defective phone.

Anyways here is the file if you want to try it.

Please be advised, I can't guarantee this will work for any other model of Moto-G, and I do not guarantee this will fix the issue for you on your XT-1034 Moto G, I'm only offering this to anyone who wants to try this as a last ditch effort before they give up on their messed up Moto-G

 UPDATE: the US Retail Blur_Version.210.12.32.falcon_umts.AWSRetail.en.US 4.4.3 Factory firmware from here fixed the issue, it also adds a handy sim tool utility.


Saturday, February 1, 2014

how-to fix a Samsung 11.6 inch ARM Chromebook if it has a blank screen during startup

OK first, you need to make sure you are having the same problem I was experiencing. On my Samsung 11.6" ARM Chromebook I was having a problem that whenever I turned my Chromebook on it wasn't turning on the backlight on my screen. You can tell if this is happening by shining a light onto the screen. If this is what is happening to your chromebook the light will allow you to see that there is a very very faint image of the normal login screen. You can also do a reset on it to get it to come on (To do a reset press and hold the power button for 30 or so seconds, then let go and then press the power button again), but it will keep doing it until you follow these steps each time the Chromebook is turned off.

1. first make sure anything you have saved on your chromebook that you want to keep is saved to a thumbdrive or external hard drive, or to your google drive. We will be turning developer mode on, and doing this will wipe the 16 GB SSD drive on your chromebook and reset it to factory settings (no user profiles,etc.)

2. next power off your chromebook using the reset method described above (otherwise recovery will show up with the same issue where the backlight is turned off).

3. press and hold the esc and the refresh key (the one that looks like a arrow going in a circle), and then tap the power button. this boots the Chromebook into recovery mode.

4. you are now in recovery mode, the next step is to press control-d and you will then it will ask you to confirm that you are about to go into developer mode once you have confirmed the system will reboot into dev mode and show a progress bar across the top. once this finishes it will reboot again and take you back to a screen where you are prompted to press space to exit developer mode.

5. Press space and the system will erase the storage on your chromebook again and then reboot to normal mode.

If you wish to keep the Chromebook in developer mode you can press control-d and then skip step 5, however you will have to do this each time the Chromebook is turned on or alternately wait 30 seconds afterwards the Chromebook will then boot normally.

Another thing to try is doing a reset as described above, then pressing the refresh button and then tapping the power  button, this is supposed to do a hard reset without entering recovery. I haven't tried this method yet, if my Chromebook acts up again I will give it a try and if it works I will update this post.