I’m trying to figure out how to communicate with a bricked phone.
Sometimes when custom firmware is flashed, it destroys the boot process. This leaves the device without the ability to naturally load more firmware. At this point JTAG is the only option. The problem is that JTAG requires microsoldering 14 connections within 2.5mm of space. This is super-human soldering.
I know that it is possible to initiate communication with the non-volitile IROM code which runs in protected memory on the phone. We are trying to work with it here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1018862
I’m not good at assembly language. It’s very difficult for my mind to register 5 operations which represent an addition and multiplication. Is there a good tool which can take ARM assembly language and put it into a higher level language?
This is the file we’re looking at. http://teamkomin.googlecode.com/svn-history/r75/branches/IROMcode/bootdumps.rar
The key word you’re looking for here is ‘decompiler’. Decompiling machine code to anything useful is one of the traditionally hard problems as too much information has been lost.
It appears (e.g. via Decompiling an ARM asm back to C or What's a good C decompiler?) that Hex-Rays is about the best there is. But it’s not cheap — starts at about $2000.