Unbrick Root Vodafone Smart 4 Mini (Vodafone 785)

Posted on by mcmonkeys1

History

Got one of these phones new boxed for €50 unlocked. It’s an Italian Vodafone.it mobile. Has MT6572 dual core 1.3GHz and 512MB + 4GB (2GB /sdcard). Found the phone a little slower than expected, seems to have squashfs installed from errors I was getting (a type of zipped filesystem) :-/ Couldn’t find any updates or custom roms anywhere online. Just lots of people complaining that they’d bricked their phones and couldn’t fix them. Ended up rooting with KingRoot, Super-sume etc. couldn’t replace kingroot with SuperSU :-( :-( :-( Stuck with garbage all over phone.

Four days later I soft bricked the damned thing by changing the build.prop file and trying to reboot. Stuck with spinning circle :-0 …I am an idiot.

Did more searching on google, found nothing but dead link to mega.co.nz rom file. Brainflash! This is an italian phone, switch google search to Italian, eureka! Weirdly enough it brings me to Portuguese forum dedicated to vodafone 785. (https://www.androidpt.com/topic/57034-unbrick-smart-4-mini/)

Unbricking Vodafone 785

Caveat: Do you have a micro SD card with about 500MB space free? If not get one, you’ll need one for the tiny amount of space this phone comes with anyhow. You will also need a USB adapter unless your PC has a card reader built-in.

Disclaimer: it’s not my fault if this does not work for you or you mess up your phone further.

The hardest part of doing this was knowing what to do with the phone physically. The phone will only boot into recovery mode etc in specific configurations. Make sure you’ve got plenty of charge in the phone too. I will be referring to these “configurations” in the unbricking steps.

Phone recovery mode configuration

Open the phone, take out battery, sim + sdcard. Put back in battery. Do not connect the usb cable. Hold in the power button and Volume+ buttons until you go into recovery then release.

Phone flashing configuration

Take everything out of the phone including battery. Plug in the usb cable and tap the power button once only.

Installing CWM Recovery

  1. Go to this link and download everything http://abelhas.pt/euricoalex/Smart4Mini
  2. Install the windows drivers:
    Put the phone into recovery mode
    Unrar PdaNetA4150.rar, and run PdaNetA4150.exe, install drivers
    When PdaNet installer asks for USB connection, plug in phone.
    Program will be asking to install apk on phone, we can not, we’re bricked, just ignore it it will go away eventually but do not cancel installation.
    PdaNet installed, good! Have drivers.
  3. NOW PAY THE HELL ATTENTION HERE!
    Put phone into flashing configuration, do NOT connect cable yet.
    Unzip “SP_Flash_Tool_v3.1344.0.212 (1).rar”
    Run Flash_tool.exe
    Click ‘Scatter-loading’ and pick ‘MT6572_Android_scatter.txt’
    Open menu ‘window’ and click ‘write memory’, a new tab appears
    Click to new ‘Write Memory’ tab.
    Select ‘EMMC’
    Click ‘Open Raw Data’ and load up ‘recovery.img’
    Begin Address (Hex) -> 0x0000000004180000
    Container Length (Hex) -> 0x01400000
    Click ‘Write Memory’
    DID YOU DO ALL THAT CORRECTLY??
    If you are sure, connect the usb cable
    That bar will go across the bottom as you are writing your CWM recovery
    You will get an OK popup window when it is finished

Well done, we have CWM installed. Go into recovery mode configuration and check out your good work :-) Nice eh? Check out update from sdcard, I will describe how to flash your rom that way as it’s easiest.

Installing the New ROM :-)

It’s plain sailing from here on in, you’ve done all the hard work already ;-) Make sure your battery is over 60% to be safe.

  1. Rename the file ‘Smart 4 Mini.zip’ to update.zip
  2. Plug your sdcard into your pc
  3. Copy the zip file into the root of the drive.
  4. Put the card into the phone, and replace the battery.
  5. Hold power and Volume+ buttons until CWM recovery boots
  6. Touch ‘Install Zip’
  7. Touch ‘Apply /sdcard/ update.zip’
  8. Wait ages……………………
  9. Touch ‘Reboot Phone’

You did it!! This is a Portuguese rom so you have to choose your language when you boot. Notice how much faster it is. And you are fully rooted with SuperSU as well!

Enjoy!

14 thoughts on “Unbrick Root Vodafone Smart 4 Mini (Vodafone 785)”

  1. hi,
    I was hoping that it can fix my phone but unfortunetely didn’t, I think I have some problem with partition table, EMMC_PART_BOOT1 size 4 mb, EMMC_PART_BOOT2 size 4 mb. partition size 4 mb, next EMMC_PART_PPMB 0 mb, the same as GP1, GP2,GP3 and GP4, only PART_USER size 3728 mb, almost all memory in user part,
    could you please be so kind and give me some instructions how to repartition my phone,
    Thanks

    1. When I clicked the link to download the files it brought me to a page with a 404 not foung error could someone please send me updated links! much appreciated thank you!

  2. Hi friend,

    Some questions:
    What type of phone do you have? This unbricking solution is for the Vodafone 785 a.k.a. Alcatel vf785. It will not work with any other type of phone. How did you end up with this configuration of partitions??

    After flashing this particular ROM here you should end up with 2GB between system and “custom pack” partitions, and a very clever union partition shared between /data and internal user sdcard.

    So what happened when you tried to flash?

    As for repartitioning, what tool did you use to get that partition information, and how did you end up with this configuration? It looks like you need to reflash the whole system, I hope you still have a copy of your NVRAM!

    Just in case, if you do not have this particular phone http://www.xda-developers.com is the best resource for individual phones and resources for creating custom ROMs, unbricking, rooting, etc., etc. However, they do not do some phones up there for various reasons, be it phone obscurity or phone illegality (i.e. Chinese clones of major phones).

    Let me know if you need more help :-)

  3. Hi
    Thank you very much for reply, My phone is Vodafone Smart 4 mini , (vodafone 785)and that’s why I put my coment here, My story is: I updated soft just by unsing setup in my phone and WiFi internet, after that phone worked very bad, have to wait 10 min , to load android and almost everything was not working, I found here http://forum.gsmhosting.com/vbb/f317/alcatel-vodafone-785-dead-after-format-1935259/
    how to go back to oryginal rom, I followed the instruction , using SPFlash, got green circle at the end, but the phone did not start any more, just short blink after pressing power buton. After many hours of searching I found your blog and here I am. I think my phone comunicates with computer by “Media Tech PreLoader USB VCOM (com3) ” Everythink looks fine when I use SPFlash, green circle after flashing and I can do memory test , so I have the partition information from SPFlash, there is a screen
    https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=19F52ED1BDCA3C07!2069&authkey=!AN4Oy5XibX1_lVA&v=3&ithint=photo%2cjpg

    I have full backup done by Titanium Backup, but my phone has to work to restore it
    That’s all the story, I almost lost hope to get my phone back working, but I belive that for some people it is very easy to fix it, I’ll be greatfull if you can help.
    Thanks

  4. I am not sure if that memory test writes over what you have just flashed.

    My understanding is that when you flash your ROM it creates the partitions. You cannot arbitrarily create, move, and delete partitions like on a laptop or desktop. If want to mess with partition sizes you must create a new custom ROM. So I’d forget about that line of investigation, and try and flash it properly. If it’s not booting something must have gone wrong. The method I have detailed above worked for me. It took such a lot of messing around that I thought I’d let others know about it. It’s a pretty decent ROM as well and leaves you with CWM recovery and a rooted phone. Unrooting is easy with the SuperSU app if you do not want that.

  5. My computer does not detect the telephone in recovery mode therefore I cannot advance of this step

    1. drivers.

      check the example. if you have not checked the example. check it again. this took a long time to figure out because other methods would not work.

  6. my problem solved, batery was not fully charged and the phone did not want to start after flashing, I put battery from other phone and its works perfect, thanks for your help

  9. Hi guys. Yes, it looks like the files are no longer available from the original location (https://www.androidpt.com/topic/57034-unbrick-smart-4-mini/). I had a copy of them on a server, but that server has now broken down and is in another country.

    Could someone who speaks Portuguese, go to the original Portuguese forum and request they be reuploaded? I’m sure people here would be very grateful if you could share the link back here, and I’ll make an additional backup on Google drive.

  10. please i cant download the file. please can you send me the link to download it? thanks

    1. Like i said before, I no longer have them. If someone can speak Portuguese and request them from the original forum, it would be great to have another copy of them.

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