You may have ear terms like "Factory Reset" or "Factory Default". You're right that the terminology is confusing blame Google! It's been this way since the G1. Remember the original rom is now long gone! So if you perform a factory reset it only makes sense to wipe these. During normal operation she can still only modify data and cache. Now, when the user boots, technically, most everything is the same. What was previously there is now gone! There's no way you can get back to where you were before if you don't have a backup or an original system image. When you flash one, the updater-script wipes your system partition, then copies the contents of the zip there. With the above in mind, let's look at custom ROMs. If she updated her phone via official methods the updates are still there! So not even stock devices are reset to their factory state! Thus when the user performs a factory reset, she is greeted with a phone that has no user data on it. "Factory reset" here means that the partitions that are affected by user activities are wiped clean. The ones that can't are system, and boot. On a non-rooted device we can group the partitions into two categories: the ones that can be affected by the user during normal runtime, and the ones that can't. I think I already answered this in my question, unless someone can correct me. Since rooting my Android and reading hundreds of posts, I've found that many of the terms I learned and accepted as a Computer Science grad student in the 80's don't quite mean the same thing anymore so I have to verify what everything really means before I do something.Ĭomments to this post answer the first part of my question.īut they don't really answer the second part of my question which is really a complaint: Why call it "Factory Reset" if it doesn't really restore your phone to it's stock factory state?Īt this point, the question is merely rhetorical. So, instead, they give you the option to wipe /data and /cache only, and call that a "Factory Reset" because you're not supposed to be foolish enough to root your phone in the first place according to their way of thinking. I can somehow imagine manufacturers not wanting be burdened with the extra cost that such a spec for hardware-recoverable images might have cost them, so it got left out of the standard and left out of most phones, which is why it's so easy to brick them. On the other hand, if Factory Reset does indeed wipe /boot, /system, and /recovery as well, especially /boot, what does it restore those from? Do all phones come with stock images in a real internal ROM somewhere that it can re-flash those images from? If Factory Reset wipes only /data, then I wish it were called something else, because if you've rooted your phone, it will still be left with whatever custom ROM you flashed even after a Factory Reset. What about /boot, /system, and /recovery, and /cache? When you perform a wipe data/factory reset from recovery, it is this partition that you are wiping. Wiping this partition essentially performs a factory reset on your device, restoring it to the way it was when you first booted it, or the way it was after the last official or custom ROM installation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |