Recently I was trying to completely wipe and Android device so I could pass it on to someone to work with a DJI drone so that they wouldn’t need to spend money buying a phone.
However after attempting to restore the phone to factory settings I ended up getting a boot loop issue where the phone would not load entirely.
I began searching and most of the information I found indicated that I’d need a windows computer and specialised software. It turns out though all you need is the Android SDK.
You can download the SDK for your appropriate system from here:
https://developer.android.com/studio/releases/platform-tools.html
Once you’ve downloaded them (in my case I’m on a mac) extract the files and enter the extracted folder then start adb by issuing the command “adb devices”
You should now be able to issue commands via adb. Here is what I did next:
STEP ONE – This command starts a shell session on your connected devices which means after this step you are running commands directly on your phone
beaugaudron$ adb shell
STEP TWO
~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/fota
STEP THREE
~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/misc
STEP FOUR
reboot
If you are lucky like I was you should now be rebooted and past the looping screen.
Hope this helps – the advantage of this method over others is the only program and access you need is adb, you don’t even need fastboot nor do you need to be booted into recovery mode or download mode.