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CWM Recovery Loop

I've recently been playing with some android tablets and phones, and was looking for the best OS for my TF201, Transformer Prime (IMO, it's Virtuous Prime). In the process, I installed a number of Cyanogen Mod versions, but each one had some weird quirks: auto-rotate never worked, GPS didn't work, WiFi was flakey... all in all, a terrible tablet experience.

On my way back to Virtuous Prime, I asked Cyanogen Mod to reboot into recovery mode. This was a huge mistake.

I don't know if it's a bug in Cyanogen Mod, or a bug in Clockwork Recovery, but from that point on, any reboot, cold boot, hard boot, you name it, would bring me into the CWM recovery prompt. I tried installing numerous other images, but I was still stuck with this very basic issue.

A couple websites suggested holding the power + volume down buttons to do a cold boot, and boot the OS from there. On my setup, CWM seems to have bypassed this extremely useful functionality, and instead would always take me to CWM Recovery.

I found the correct workaround on this blog: http://hmastuff.com/blog/?p=65, however I couldn't do that first cold boot step.

To workaround, I plugged in my TF201 to my computer via USB, booted into CWM Recover (like I had any choice...), and started up adb. I had this lying around from my initial rooting efforts. If you don't know how to get it, try installing the Android SDK, and looking for it in platform-tools. Anyways, I confirmed that my devices was connected with 'adb devices' and used 'adb shell' to implement the workaround I had found, and unstick my boot loop.

To summarize here's the steps:

adb shell
echo boot | dd of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p3 bs=1 seek=0
reboot

Hope that helps someone!

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