In this guide, we will make you aware of the reason and show you the steps to fix the FAILED (remote: ‘Failed to load/authenticate boot image Bad Buffer Size’) error. Out of all the major changes that took place in the past few years in the Android ecosystem, it was the introduction of the A/B partition scheme that grabbed the attention of the masses.
One major repercussion to come out of it is the fact that some Android devices now no longer have a recovery partition [whereas others still continue to retain it]. So apart from the removal of the partition, the lack of uniformity has resulted in quite a few issues or shall we say, confusion, among the end users.
Among them, the procedure of installing a custom recovery has undergone a major haul, and many newcomers in the tech community find it quite challenging to successfully flash these recoveries onto their devices. And we can’t blame them either. As a result of this, errors such as the Bad Buffer Size is always on the cards. So what exactly is this issue all about and more importantly, how can we rectify it? Let’s find out.
Reason for Bad Buffer Size
The reason why you are getting this error message stems out from the fact that you are trying to temporarily boot a custom recovery onto your device which has a dedicated recovery partition. For the unaware, if your device has a standalone recovery partition, then you should directly flash the recovery to the said partition via the fastboot flash recovery recovery.img instead of first temporary booting to the said recovery via fastboot boot twrp.img.
So you might ask how to check if your device has a recovery partition or not. Well, you can refer to the below steps and get this job done:
- Download and extract the Android SDK Platform Tools on your PC.
- Then enable USB Debugging and connect your device to PC via USB.
- Now open Command Prompt window inside the platform-tools folder.
- Type in the below three commands one after the other in CMD window:
adb shell cd /dev/block/platform ls -la /dev/block/bootdevice/by-name
- Now refer to the output and check if your device has a recovery partition.
If it does, then you should directly use the fastboot flash command. But if it doesn’t, you can then use the fastboot boot command as well. Many users prefer to use the latter over the former as it allows them to test out the recovery.img file first and if everything works well and good, they could then do a permanent flashing. However, this decision isn’t entirely in our hands as the presence or absence of the recovery partition has a major role to play in this.
Fix FAILED (remote: ‘Failed to load/authenticate boot image Bad Buffer Size’)
As of now, your device will be stuck with the aforementioned error message. Furthermore in most cases, manually rebooting your device via hardware key combinations or via the fastboot reboot command will not work and your device will boot back to Fastboot Mode. This is because the boot partition has been corrupted and we need to rectify it at the earliest. So refer to the below steps and get this job done right away)
- First off, download and extract the Android SDK Platform Tools on your PC.
- Then download the same version of firmware that is installed on your device.
- If you cannot verify the same, then download the latest firmware/Fastboot ROM.
- Then extract it and you’ll get a few files. Copy the boot.img and transfer it to platform tools.
- With your device in Fastboot Mode, connect it to your PC via a USB.
- Now open Command Prompt inside the platform tools and type in the below command:
fastboot flash boot boot.img
- Then stock boot is now flashed on your device and you can boot it to the OS via:
fastboot reboot
That’s it. These were the steps to fix the FAILED (remote: ‘Failed to load/authenticate boot image Bad Buffer Size’) error. Likewise, we have also listed the reasoning behind the same. If you have any queries concerning the aforementioned steps, do let us know in the comments. We will get back to you with a solution as soon as possible.
