this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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“Bricking,” “hard bricking,” and “soft bricking” became inexorably intertwined during the early days of flashing custom Android ROMs
HTC Dream and G2 user/modder here
I’m not familiar with that. Brick means “your item is now a brick.”
I’ve never heard of hard or soft.
At that time, “Hard Brick” was getting used for the hardware was damaged
“Soft brick” was something like a boot loop where the device was unusable, but something like a DFU flash could repair (using DFU since every manufacturer had their own boot flash implementation back then)
At some point after that, people just went back to saying “bricked” for both
As someone that rooted their phones a lot back in the day it's wild how vividly I remember this and it went down exactly as you described lol
Soft brick afaik is like when you mess up fastboot and need to use Qualcomms tool to repartition and repair fastboot.
Generally you cannot do this, but the tool leaked for some devices, this it's softbricked
QC uses the firehose protocol to load software that early, but that’s a good overview
The tools are generally available to flash, but manufacturers may not offer the next signed bootloader as something you can easily download (that one then implements fastboot)
You also need some mechanism to force the PBL to jump to download mode instead of trying to load the next bootloader