Trying to hunt down a ROM

[charlesbronson]

I have tried to contact the seller of my box with no luck. I'm trying to go back to stock or anything close that will bring back ethernet, fully working remote and not go into deep sleep where I have to unplug and plug back in to turn on. The box details are below...
- M8S s812
- board print is M9&M8_8bit_V1.1 2015/09/2
- I think the ethernet is BCM 4335
- original firmware was Android 4.4.2, build number KOT49H. 20151110 test-keys, kernel version 3.10.33 tanwei@tanwei#1 Tue Nov 10 12:29:53 CST 2015

If anyone knows where I can get this firmware or any compatible firmware please let me know.

(Firmware version Android) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4...mk5SFozYnVMeWM
(Board print) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4...WctWXZoS1NhZVk
(Board underside) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4...2FjWnk3U1hQSWc
(LED board) https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4...lZfdUQ0Ymkyb0U

[palerider]

Check your chip for wifi, may be a 6330. I do have the stock rom for the 6330.

[charlesbronson]

Check your chip for wifi, may be a 6330. I do have the stock rom for the 6330.

I am not sure how to check my WiFi chip. I provided pictures of the board top and bottom, I am not sure if that helps.

[prahjister]

Pic of bottom looks like a wifi chip and antenna is close. Odd shaped doesn't look like a ap6xxx or rtl8xxx what does it say I can't read

[charlesbronson]

Pic of bottom looks like a wifi chip and antenna is close. Odd shaped doesn't look like a ap6xxx or rtl8xxx what does it say I can't read

The printing on the green board under the chip shows "L3 RL-SM08-4335-V1.1b" and the chip has printing on it stating "KM3208069 XJ-A"

[prahjister]

Odd one

[meknb]

I had a similar problem finding a rom for my m8s, I flashed matricon android 5.1.1 which wifi bluetooth and lan all worked, But remote and power up and down didn't So i backed it up with twrp.
Then tried booting with various boot loader.img from various firmwares, just renaming it to u-boot.bin and using boot card maker and booting from sdcard.
When I found one that powered my box on and off ok, I flashed that firmware just to install that bootloader Then used twrp to restore the matricon 5.1.1 backup Twrp doesn't seem to backup bootloader which controls sleep and wakeup.
You could probably just swap bootloader.img in the firmware zip somehow but i couldn't get them to flash??
As for the remote i just backed up the /etc/remote.conf that worked and replaced it with twrp.

[charlesbronson]

I had a similar problem finding a rom for my m8s, I flashed matricon android 5.1.1 which wifi bluetooth and lan all worked, But remote and power up and down didn't So i backed it up with twrp.
Then tried booting with various boot loader.img from various firmwares, just renaming it to u-boot.bin and using boot card maker and booting from sdcard.
When I found one that powered my box on and off ok, I flashed that firmware just to install that bootloader Then used twrp to restore the matricon 5.1.1 backup Twrp doesn't seem to backup bootloader which controls sleep and wakeup.
You could probably just swap bootloader.img in the firmware zip somehow but i couldn't get them to flash??
As for the remote i just backed up the /etc/remote.conf that worked and replaced it with twrp.

To confirm, do you have the same board as my pictures? If so can you provide links to the firmware you used for bootloader and the ROM? Right now I am running 5.1 which is for the M8S+ but so far it's the only ROM I have found that runs on my box.

[FerociousAndroid]

Hello CB,

Did you ever resolve? I have a StroomBox M8S and seems to have very, very similar board (see pics). Seems like I have the BCM4335?

Thanks

[Artemis-kun]

I, too, am on the hunt for this stock image for nearly the identical board as posted here. All of my chips are identical, including that weird looking WiFi chip, which, apparently, must be the AP6330 despite all indications on the board otherwise, as I've been trying dozens of ROMs, and the only ones that work are the ones including the AP6330 driver in /system/etc. My board -does- have one printing difference that I don't see on any of these other pictures, it has "S812-20160116-V1.2" but based on what I've done so far, I don't think that makes a difference in terms of what ROM works for our boards.

To give a bit more detail of what I've done and where I'm at, I picked up this unit last week, and while I was totally happy with it on 4.4, I figured "why not see how it works on 5.1" which was my big mistake, doubly so for not taking a full device backup with TWRP before flashing another ROM, but I guess one lives and learns. My box wound up bricking, and I revived it thanks to the work done in this thread so I am now functioning sort of fully on the 5.1 ROM that Dia linked in that thread, but it's very not ideal. The build.prop is missing the navbar and I think the permissions are messed up in terms of updating stuff, as the play store wouldn't update, and I was having problems with Google accounts. I've since added TWRP back to my box and have been experimenting with dozens of OTA ROMs from the chinagadgetsreviews site, as if you make some minor modifications to the OTA zip files, you can flash whatever you like using TWRP and it won't error. Of course, finding the -right- ROM is all kinds of hit and miss so far. But, I didn't notice charlesbronson 's OP on this thread, which helpfully has that screengrab of the original firmware's build date. Looks like one of the ROMs I downloaded might do the trick, the one linked from here and I don't think I've tried it yet, I'll give it a shot tonight and post results.

At any rate, I won't be giving up on this til I get my box back to stock, so I will update this as I make findings/progress, and if I can find an OTA update that works and gets everything fully functional and back to stock, I'll be sure to post the details for getting it and steps to installing it here.

PS, I've also reached out to the seller that I bought this box from, it's a fairly reasonable size company, so hopefully I'll get an answer from them, and will follow up here with my results. Worse comes to worse, I may just buy another box from this same seller, do a full device TWRP backup, then return the 'new' box since TWRP runs portable, and then we'll all have a cleanly acquired full device backup to get our boxes going again.

[Artemis-kun]

Good news, everyone! The ROM from the following link

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B24hOL-wTsFGSXUxV3NUb3VtTWc/view

works to restore this box back to stock! 100% as far as hardware is concerned, I haven't tried any video playback, but considering I have a fully functioning ROM, recovery, remote control, wifi, ethernet WITH DHCP, functioning Play Store that updates AND working Google account stuff, I'm thinking this is pretty much perfection.

So, where to even start. After this adventure I've had, I'm thinking a lot of the steps I took might be unnecessary, and the simple answer to all the problems of flashing OTA updates lies with the fact that while we have a working TWRP, it isn't 100% working. You'll notice when you load TWRP, if you look at the logs, it comes up with an error almost right away stating that it cannot find the size of the bootloader partition, so that right there is probably a big source of bricks, because if you flash ANY ROM with this TWRP that contains a bootloader, it will brick the bootloader cuz TWRP doesn't understand where to write the file. Compounding this issue is that the build of TWRP still identifies at the device level as a k200 device, when our devices are n200C, which leads to those error messages when attempting to flash the ROM.

So, how to solve this? Pretty simple, once I thought about it. Instead of using TWRP, we should be using the recovery.img included with the OTA updates! One nice thing with our boxes is that they designed it to load recovery images from SD/USB if they are present, so all I did with my box was the following:

1. Copy both recovery.img AND n200C-ota-20151110.zip from the above-linked zip to the root of a USB drive (SD card probably works too, but I never tested that, so your kilometerage may vary)
2. Plug in the USB drive to the USB port closest to the HDMI port (at one point, I noticed the other USB port didn't seem to want to load recovery images, so both ports may work, but I install using the one closest the HDMI port)
3. Hold the button at the back of the A/V port
4. Connect power
5. Release the button 2-3 seconds after you see the boot logo

And that's it, you should end up in the stock recovery program, select the appropriate install source (EXT -> SD/USB) and install. This method worked flawlessly on my box, likely because the recovery image date matched the OTA update's date, and it likely correctly identifies the box.

If for whatever reason this doesn't work, the following is how I got to the point where it did work:

1. Open the zip
2. Extract the n200C-ota-20151110.zip file and open it
3. Navigate to /META-INF/com/google/android
4. Open/edit updater-script
5. Delete the first 2 lines of this file (make sure to use a proper text editor like notepad++ or something else that clearly shows line numbers, as deleting the wrong parts of this file could be disastrous)
6. Delete the line "write_raw_image(package_extract_file("bootloader. img"), "bootloader");" (no quotes)
7. Save the file somewhere (no extension, just "updater-script" no quotes), and then replace the one in the zip with the one you just saved
8. Navigate back to the root of the n200C-ota-20151110.zip file and delete "bootloader.img" (no quotes) from the zip

That's it. With this modification, you can safely flash the ROM and it will not error, nor will it brick if you flash via TWRP, but when I flashed the ROM in this manner, while literally everything else worked fine, the ethernet port was non-functional. I suspect somehow the bootloader must be involved with this, but at any rate, I wound up fixing it by doing the flashing steps from the first part of this post, using the unmodified OTA update and the recovery.img from the primary zip file. I can't say for sure if you have to go this route, or if the steps outlined above will be enough, people can post their findings from here, for myself I have already had enough heartache over tinkering with Android boxes that I'm not interested in further exploratory surgery. But, I'll keep an eye on replies in case others have trouble with these steps, but I think this should work nicely for everyone that was still having problems.

[charlesbronson]

Artemis-kun thank you for the detailed post. My only question is for the USB stick method did you format the stick with any specific format or application? I'm going to give this a try, hopefully this will get me back on stock so I can use Ethernet again.

[Artemis-kun]

charlesbronson nothing in particular, I just formatted it in Windows as fat32, default allocation size, when I first started doing this, so other than that nothing special. I feel pretty confident that this will sort you out, I've had my box back up for a couple of hours now, been watching paid content from Youtube without issue, and just getting Kodi set back up now, so far not a single problem with anything. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you!

[charlesbronson]

Artemis-kun Well I am speechless. I have been hunting this ROM down for ages. I actually had it on my laptop desktop since September but could not install it without getting errors. I noticed the file you linked to had a similar name so I compared the 2 and the files matched exactly. I followed your directions. The only difference I had to make was to enter recovery after flashing the file and do a dalvik/cache factory reset as it was bootlooping at the mbox screen, but after the factory reset everything booted up. I got WiFi and my ethernet is back and running again, my remote works fully again without any zip file patches being needed. The OS is back to the original. I'm beyond thankful. I cannot tell you how long I have been messing with this box and constantly bricking it.

The only thing I am curious about and I know I should stop while I am ahead is I wonder if I can flash 5.1.1 without flashing bootloader and recovery. My reason for this is I find the factory ROM to be unstable at times, causing freezing with some playback, or getting stuck and unresponsive when waking up from standby. I found 5.1.1 to be very stable, much more than 4.4. But I would hate to lose ethernet again. I am fine losing WiFi and remote, but I find the box works much better with ethernet for me and from what I can tell, ethernet seems to be lost when my bootloader changes.

[Artemis-kun]

charlesbronson Very glad to hear that I at least got you back on the right path! Sorry for neglecting to mention the wipe cache/dalvik bit, it's so ingrained in me as a default step when flashing ROMs that I totally forgot about it.

Regarding trying to fix the 5.1.1 ROM, well while I'm quite well versed with typical Android stuff, ethernet isn't exactly common on Android devices, so I'm not entirely sure where they stick the drivers for it. I mean, including them in the bootloader kind of makes sense, since the ethernet port does power on as soon as you power on the box, so it would have to load that driver at that time. But, that makes it so it'll be virtually impossible to try and mod the drivers into a working bootloader for 5.1.1, since bootloaders are normally OS version-specific, and without knowing the partition map of the bootloader for our boxes, we can't really modify anything in the bootloader image anyway. It seems to me the only way we'll see working ethernet in 5.1.1 is if they put out an actual version of 5.1.1 for our boxes. As for just removing the bootloader from the ROM, that'll just result in a bootloop or bootfreeze, since the bootloader won't be for the right OS version. You can give it a try, as long as you're certain you removed the bootloader.img file and modified update-script accordingly it won't brick you, but I would be very surprised if it booted.

That all said, it's entirely possible that there's another option, I can't say I've done much research on the topic yet, but I'm fairly certain we'd need someone who's far more familiar with Android development than I am. Another possible suggestion I can offer is you can try one of the newer n200C firmwares posted on that chinagadgetreviews site, to confirm if your wifi will work in the ROM you pick, open the OTA zip and look under /system/etc/wifi/<folder name here changes, it should be the only folder>/ and if you see any entries in this folder for nvram_ap6330.txt then you know the ROM will work for wifi with our boxes. Of course, the typical caveats with that, entirely possible that even though it's a n200C ROM with the right wifi and flashed via the included recovery.img could brick the box, but at least we've got a process now for recovering bricks all the way back to stock. I just am not yet in the mood to tinker with the box some more :P But, if I get into that mood, I'll be sure to update here with anything more that I figure out.