Motorola Droid Bionic Bootstrap Recovery

This is a Bootstrap application written for the Droid Bionic that will throw you into a custom recovery. This works in the same sense as the Droid X and Droid 2 Bootstrap recoveries put out by koush. As per the standard for this thing, use at your own risk!

Below are some of the common questions people have had regarding the application.

A: NO. Clockwork Recovery is only officially released by koush. This is only available for those who don't want to wait for an available recovery to crop up through his market account or ROM Manager. If he wants me to maintain this for him then so be it, but until I hear otherwise CWR is only officially released when koush has given it his seal of approval, thus this is considered CWR-based.

A: ABSOLUTELY NOT. See the known issue regarding wiping internal storage below.

A: NO. This uses a bootstrap method to start recovery via the system's initialization process.

A: I am not certain. I am not familiar with how the 2nd-init recovery boots up, however, I do know that it must utilize some similar hijacking methods as the bootstrapper as installing the bootstrap recovery overwrites the ability to access 2nd-init recovery.

I am not certain about the specifics of 2nd-init recovery, but it is my understanding that both utilize hijacking on the system partition, and therefore neither is a perfect solution which will save you in all situations.

For that reason, I chose to make the bootstrap recovery as the source code for making the application was readily available, and it was good enough for what I need it to do (install update.zips and backup/restore nandroids). I may research the 2nd-init method further at a later date.

A: See known issues below. That's not a problem with the recovery but an incompatible install zip. Check the known issues section for more info.

Without further ado, I present the actual download! Keep in mind that this works in the same way that the Droid2Bootstrap and DroidXBootstrap applications work.

Source code is available on my github:

BionicBootstrap

Here is a thread on RootzWiki for general discussion and additional support: RootzWiki: CWM Recovery for the Droid Bionic by CVPCS

I have gotten some feedback that some people are reporting having some problems with the recovery. In an effort to make their lives a little easier, I have added this section to cover some of the issues that have been reported.

The Droid 3 and the Bionic share similar hardware, but are different enough (namely in their partition maps) that they cannot share the same recovery. If you attempt to, you will end up potentially wiping your internal storage partition. Because of this, you are strongly advised NOT to install BionicBootstrap on a Droid 3.

Some people have reported that installing various update.zip files does not work. After some consideration I believe I have found the problem. The Droid Bionic has some architectural differences than standard ARM phones from the past, and as such binaries built for older phones (such as the Droid X), will crash if you attempt to run them on the Bionic. Specifically, they will throw a segmentation fault and return error code 0.

The update packages utilize a technology known as edify, that bundles an update-binary and an updater-script that is run by the update-binary. If you bundle an update-binary from an old device, then the install will crash and fail with error code 0.

The solution is to bundle the newer update-binary built specifically for the bionic. Obviously that can be tedious to build as you have to setup a build environment for the entire source tree to do so. Thus, to save you, the users, some time, I have taken the liberty of rebuilding and publishing update-binary for you! You can find it below. Simply replace the existing update-binary found in your install packages (should be found under META-INF/com/google/android/update-binary) with the one below, repackage and try again!

Hope this helps!

Special thanks to jrummy16 for helping to test this fix! :D

The progress bar doesn't appear to move during some operations. Rest assured the system is still working, just wait it out.

This problem will be looked into.