To Android Hell and back
I rooted my HTC Desire over three months ago using the great guide on android.modaco.com. Happily rooted for a month or so, I then took advantage of Paul’s r5 release of a Froyo Rom (now archived) which I installed with ROM Manager. It worked perfectly well and I was blown away by the massive performance boost Froyo delivers.
So, being the inquisitive type, why wouldn’t I try r8 of the same ROM? I used ROM Manager to make a backup and install the ROM, but upon rebooting, something went wrong. I got a new Android splash screen, but it just kept on splashing, with no actual Android goodness at the end!
eep! Lucky I made a backup!
So my phone was borked, but I didn’t panic (yet) and got on to fixing it.
In the end, I’m still not sure what happened, but here’s my solution: - I eventually got the system to boot by choosing “Wipe cache partition” from Recovery mode only to find that the SD Card and USB had been disabled! This is where I panicked as that means no adb, no shell, no nothing! - My first step was to do as I usually do when something goes wrong and go back to step 1 and start again. This involved attempting to use the recovery script that came with my original rooting pack. This was a mistake and complete waste of time as my phone was already rooted. - I fixed the lack of SD Card by following some of the steps in this post: - Enter fast boot mode with the USB cable attached. - Type fastboot oem enableqxdm 0 at the command line (I used fastboot-mac from the guide linked at the top of this post)
- I fixed the lack of USB connectivity by following the steps in this post.
- I then made the mistake of restoring an old version of Android (1.21). I put this down to a little bit of panic and having to multitask on other equally engaging tasks (i.e. work). Android 1.21 was great at crashing. I couldn’t even load the market place to install ROM Manager to restore my previous backup.
- I eventually managed to restore my backup by using the recovery-update.zip file which is automatically packaged up with your ROM Manager backups by renaming it to update.zip and placing it at the root of my SD Card. I then performed the usual restore update.zip method in recovery mode.
- Loading this update.zip loads Clockworkmod, the brains behind ROM Manager. From here I was able to restore my backup.
Now, if only that burning desire to try again would go away…