Phone Does Not Boot

Well well well. You've bricked the phone. Well done.

This can happen when you become a little too curious about what the fmt commands do.

All is not lost, you can most likely recover the phone with a bit of effort.

Requirements

Access to the phone's UART debugging interface
A tftp server
- I used the inbuilt one with truenas.
A copy of some firmware. (See JackGit)

Steps

Configure your tftp server and place the .bin file from the firmware zip file inside the root directory.
Access the phone's UART debug interface
Power on the phone.
- If the phone cannot boot it will enter into the bootloader (PSPBoot) shell, psbl.
- You should see something similar to this.
- NOTE: If you mistype a command the shell will hang and the device will need to be power cycled. This gets annoying fast. Good luck!

Basic POST completed...     Success.
Last reset cause: Hardware reset (Power-on reset)

PSPBoot1.4 rev: 1.4.0.6
(c) Copyright 2002-2008 Texas Instruments, Inc. All Rights Reserved.


Press ESC for monitor... 1

(psbl)

Next set the following environment variables:
- The static IP Address of the phone:
  - setenv IPA 192.168.1.200
- The subnet mask:
  - setenv SUBNET_MASK 255.255.255.0
- The MAC address:
  - setenv HWA_0 aa:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa
- The MAC port:
  - setenv MAC_PORT 0
- I'm not 100% sure you need to do this but I haven't checked.
You should be ready to upgrade the firmware.
- upgrade -i <TFTP_SERVER_IP> spa50x-30x-7-4-6.bin
If successful, you'll see the new firmware be written to memory.

(psbl) upgrade -i 192.168.1.5 fw.bin
Validate firmware successful
Cannot upgrade bootloader in bootloader/recovery
Cannot upgrade bootloader in bootloader/recovery
Programming sector:3
Programming sector:4
Programming sector:66
Programming sector:67
Programming sector:68
Programming sector:69
Programming sector:70
Programming sector:71
Programming sector:72
...
Programming sector:125
Programming sector:126
Programming sector:127

Finally, reboot the phone by either:
- Power cycle
- reboot