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I'm trying to back up boot.img, recovery.img, and system.img on my Android phone. I've found several mentions of running this command:

cat proc/mtd

and then just using dd to copy the listed mount points. Seems straightforward enough. Unfortunately, the output of that command is just this single line:

dev:    size   erasesize  name

df also doesn't list the usual "Mounted On" column, just the filesystem. This is the output of df:

Filesystem             Size   Used   Free   Blksize
/dev                   234M    52K   234M   4096
/mnt/secure            234M     0K   234M   4096
/mnt/asec              234M     0K   234M   4096
/mnt/obb               234M     0K   234M   4096
/system                640M   459M   180M   4096
/data                    1G   406M   898M   4096
/cache                 369M     6M   363M   4096
/protect_f               8M     4M     4M   4096
/protect_s               8M     4M     4M   4096
/mnt/cd-rom              1M     1M     0K   2048
/storage/sdcard1         1G    24M     1G   16384
/storage/sdcard0         7G     2G     5G   32768
/mnt/secure/asec         7G     2G     5G   32768

Some details about my phone:

  • It's a BLU ADVANCE 4.0
  • Board is Mediatek MT6572
  • Android version is 4.2.2
  • Kernel version is 3.4.5
  • I do have root access

So, to reiterate my question - where are the partitions? How can I find them?

While I'm not necessarily averse to using programs other than the shell it seems like I really should be able to do this from there.

EDIT: I used dd on the various mmcblk files I found in /dev/block. Most of them I terminated prematurely as they were 100MiB+, but two (mmcblk0p2 and mmcblk0p3) came out to about 10MiB each which seems more probable for boot and recovery. The contents of these when mounted are:

  • a directory labelled lost+found (ext?)
  • a directory labelled md, the subcontents of which differ

In mmcblk0p2 the contents of md are:

  • Two files of unknown type, one 4B one 2.0KiB, labelled MPOD_000 and ST33A004 respectively

In mmcblk0p3 the contents of md are:

  • One file of unknown type, 2.0KiB, labelled ST33B004
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11
  • Well, the boot and recovery partitions aren't mounted when Android is actually running. Do you have a /dev/block/platform directory? Usually you can get your mount points by looking in whatever subdirectory is in there (varies by chipset) and looking for the by-name directory within that. So, e.g. on my N5 it's /dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name. If I run ls -al there it shows where all the partitions map to.
    – eldarerathis
    Jun 5, 2014 at 20:44
  • I had noticed that directory but unfortunately there's no by name option. There are a couple called mmcblk0boot0 and mmcblk0boot1 - one of them could be the boot one but it's tough to say which, if either. There is a /dev/BOOT and a /dev/recovery but BOOT gives an invalid argument error to dd and cat and /dev/recovery keeps going way longer than it should (I stopped it at 800MiB+, bigger than the system partition).
    – Dylan
    Jun 5, 2014 at 21:17
  • Dylan, one typo: leading slash missing for cat /proc/mtd. Could that be the cause of the empty output? Also, df only lists partitions currently mounted (/recovery is only mounted when booted into, AFAIK).
    – Izzy ♦
    Jun 5, 2014 at 21:32
  • 2
    MTK devices usually have an item named 'recovery' under /dev. Have you tried dd-ing that?
    – dantis
    Jun 6, 2014 at 8:30
  • 1
    Have you tried using the bs flag? Try something like dd if=/dev/recovery of=/sdcard/recovery.img bs=6291456c count=1 (from XDA)
    – dantis
    Jun 29, 2014 at 11:51

1 Answer 1

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as aureljared already mentioned, proper configured MTK devices populate their recovery and boot partitions in /dev/recovery and /dev/bootimg. Just dd from there.

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