Fix for "moto g always booting into recovery"

Today I reinstalled and wiped my old moto g (falcon) phone.
After all was done, it finally did no longer boot anywhere but into recovery -- no matter which recovery I flashed. It was still possible to boot into fastboot mode (Volume down + Power button), then select "normal system boot", but that's certainly not a good user experience on every power-on.
Additionally, the "charge battery when powered off" image was no longer working: plugging in power would also boot into recovery.

Some googling finally lead me to a xda-developers forum post which has the solution: there is a raw partition in the flash, which apparently stores the default boot option for the boot loader, just wiping this partition will restore the default boot order.

So when booted into recovery (must have adb enabled), just run

adb shell \ 

  dd if=/dev/zero \

  of=/dev/block/platform/msm_sdcc.1/by-name/misc

from your computer (adb installed and USB cable connected, of course).
This should fix booting (it did for me).

 

Restoring stock recovery on Moto G

Yesterday, my Moto G got an Official update to Android 4.4.4. Yeah!
Unfortunately, it did not work: After downloading the update, the phone went into a boot loop, because CWM 6.0.4.6 (which I had installed in order to root the device) cannot flash the update. The phone then boots up, just to shut reboot almost immediately into recovery to try again.
To get out of this boot loop, I manually entered recovery and wiped the "cache" partition.
I retried with the latest CWM 6.0.4.7, this also did not work.
So I had to get the original stock recovery image for the Moto G and flash that. I did not easily find it with a web search, so in the end I downloaded the matching stock SBF image for my installed firmware (in my case "Blur_Version.176.44.1.falcon_umts.Retail.en.DE") from the Moto G firmware page on droid-developers.org, looked into the zip file and found that there is a "recovery.img" in the archive.

Now everything was easy: boot the phone into fastboot mode (power on + volume down), then

fastboot erase recovery

fastboot flash recovery recovery.img

reboot, once the phone is booted select "install system update" from the notification, stock recovery boots and installs the update, done.
I did not even lose root access, so I kept the stock recovery for now.
Later on I checked the md5sum of the recovery.img I flashed and of the recovery partition on the phone and they are identical, so the 4.4.4 update did not flash a new recovery for me. I'll keep the old one around in case I need it again.