i spent some time learning about things my device’s partitions are all mounted in the ramdisk loaded by the kernel, completely separate from the system partition i’ve been reflashing. the ramdisk is in a partition in another custom android format called bootimg. there are tools online from the android source to make these images and unpack them. the unix magic file utility also shows the ramdisk offset to manually extract it.
these various partitions can yield fruit, for example there may be logfiles in the cache partition. it looks like the way to disable encryption would be to repack my bootimg partition. the recovery image is a gzipped cpio archive. worried some about my use of time.
