Recovery program only accesible via "adb recovery" but the program closes itself

Question

My tablet (a chinese SmartQ T10 with Android v2.3.4 unofficial Firmware) does not have custom recovery via power buttons combo, nor CWM recovery available to download. The only key combination (Vol ++Power) that does anything, goes directly to firmware restore from a file named /mnt/sdcard/SmartQT10 (at SD Card) if this file exists.

But if I completely start into Android, go to ADB on my computer and I do:

adb connect IPTablet:5555
adb shell recovery

It appears a fancy classic recovery program on the tablet's screen (full screen mode), as you can see:

^{Screenshot (click image for larger variant)}

but with a strange behavior: this supposed recovery program lasts for only a few seconds, and my tablet get back to whatever it had just before on the screen (Android desktop, for example). After a few seconds, the recovery program gets back to screen, a few seconds there, and back to the desktop... and so on. The things stay like this until I press Ctrl+C on the ADB console of my PC.

If I touch any key of the tablet or press on the screen, the screen goes back instantly to Android screen and the recovery program disappear, so I can not interact with the recovery program. The recovery program is like any kind of "ghost" screen. And one more (don't know if important) detail: the selection menu of the recovery program moves down once each 2-3 seconds, just like if I were pressing any "down" key or so, a thing that I am not doing at all.

I must conclude that my tablet has any kind of recovery program inside, but it can not start for any reason.

This method:

adb shell reboot recovery

goes into firmware restoration mode, as I told before. This other:

adb shell reboot bootloader

performs a simple reboot.

Having this recovery program available would be great. Could anyone, please, tell me how could I do to keep it working? Or maybe there is any way to start it on boot, as I have seen in many others Android devices?

I see it shows some "can't mount" directory messages, as you can see in the capture, but I don't know how to solve those problems or if solving them would be useful to finally accessing the recovery program.

Answer 1

I don't know for sure if this is your only problem, but I'm posting it as an answer just in case. You seem to be confused about adb commands.

adb shell foo

is a command that tells adb to open a shell on the device, and run the command foo on the device, whatever you say there for foo. Therefore, the command you've been running,

adb shell recovery

doesn't tell the device to go into recovery mode: it tells the device to run a command named recovery, while Android's still running. From your description, it sounds like this is the same program that the recovery mode uses, but it's not intended to be run while Android is running. It's writing to the screen directly, without going through Android, which is why it keeps disappearing and can't accept input. It's actually pretty sloppy work on the part of the manufacturer that you can run this program at all from within Android.

In the same way, the command you want to use to reboot into the bootloader is

adb reboot-bootloader

(On newer adb versions you can replace the hyphen with a space if you like.) There's no shell in the command, because this is an instruction to adb, not a command to run on the device.