Over the weekend, I upgraded my phone’s #Android14 to #Android15. This was the most difficult upgrade I have ever done.
I have upgraded to the latest version of TWRP so it was a matter of doing backups and taking it off the phone. Flash the desired version of custom ROM and format data.
All that went through smoothly, most of the apps have been restored from Google. WhatsApp have restored the chats and in the process of expanding the photos. So I chance a restart to roo the phone via Magisk, to restore Huawei’s Healthconnect and Xiaomi Home apps.
In recovery I noticed I could not copy Magisk file into the phone and there are no entries for files and every partition is 0 bytes. That is not good. I could not format the /data partition because it could not be mounted.
In the past, to fix this is to ask on the XDA forums. Now is Telegram groups. The admin of one the groups asked me to change the recovery from TWRP to Pitch Black Recovery Project (PBRP) and the Partition type from f2fS to ext2. Using a very old laptop, In preparation to reflash everything from a USB OTG, I was copied the rom file into a USB drive. This took forever for a 3GB file.
The USB OTG could not be mounted. Uh Oh.
Restarted the phone and the G logo came up, every thing got restored properly. I restarted again into Recovery and checked everything was working fine.
Almost everything came back, Google’s timeline can now be backed up to the cloud, but the past 4 months of location history are stuck. Swift backup could not restore it. Sob
Before I forget, the UI for #PBRP is really beautiful!