Restore the Flame's software after a failed upgrade

I own a Flame developer reference phone that runs Firefox OS and have been playing with it for a couple of weeks. The Flame is a fully unlocked device: you have access to the bootloader and can change the firmware. Unfortunately, like me, you may fail to flash the firmware. But as we will see, you can still recover your phone.

Fastboot to the rescue

I tried to upgrade my Flame device to a newer version but the upgrade failed for an unknown reason. Even worse, my phone did not boot correctly after the failed upgrade: it was blocked after the "animated fox" appeared on screen. Thus I could not even use my Flame to phone...

In such a situation, the solution is to boot the Flame in fastboot mode. For that, you have to press the right combination of keys to instruct the bootloader to enter fastboot mode. For the Flame, you should press power and volume down at the same time.

After pressing power + volume down, your Flame device should boot and display the "Thundersoft" red logo. Plug your phone to your computer with the USB cable and invoke the fastboot utility in a terminal emulator:

$ fastboot devices
1da25746        fastboot

Great! Your device has entered fastboot mode and is ready to be flashed with the original Firefox OS firmware.

Flashing the original Flame firmware

The procedure to flash the original Flame firmware is described in updating your Flame's software. Download the base image named v123.zip v18D_nightly_v5.zip (Update march 2019: the URLs of the base images mentioned in the documentation are dead, but several Firefox OS enthusiasts keep sharing base images) and decompress it. The archive contains a shell script called flash.sh that you will need to edit. I commented out some lines in order to skip the instructions executed before fastboot devices.

# adb kill-server
# adb devices
# adb reboot bootloader
fastboot devices

After running the script, my Flame phone was fully restored and I could enjoy it again (and even use it as a phone)!

Thumbs-up for a Firefox OS user who restored his phone!
César, Le Pouce, Fondation Cartier