Well, I did get S-OFF. It took me two nights (totalled about 8 hours). Required much time at the jBear mIRC chat room for all sorts of things the jBear website doesn't tell you. I was using the original first version of jBear S-OFF, so it is possible things have changed for the better.
jBear's website is
unlimited.io
(no www. )
Here are my pointers:
1. Use a spare SD card. The jBear process will end up wiping it. When you are all done that SD card will need to be totally reformatted. It takes quite some time to format an SD card, so I did it in my PC.
2. Find the kernel boot.img file for the current GB, ICS Leak, or ROM that you are currently using. You also need to know the adb/fastboot commands to flash that kernel file. The jBear process replaces your kernel and reboots to this jBear kernel. If you are not successful at doing S-OFF and want to stop trying and put your phone into a usable state, you will need to flash your saved kernel file. No kernel file equals you can't use your phone.
3. Make a nandroid backup of your entire system (check all boxes in Ramon RA recovery). You might need it - as I certainly did.
4. You download the sBear zip file for your firmware (GB or leaked ICS) and copy the files from the zip file to the directory on your PC where you have the adb/fastboot files stored. (Of course you should have a working adb/fastboot system with the htc drivers installed).
5. Boot up your phone normally, connect phone to PC as charge-only with usb debugging ON, and then run the jBear exe file on your PC. You don't know how much time I wasted trying to run the jBear exe file and getting errors while the phone was in bootloader/fastboot mode. The video on the jBear website shows starting off in hboot/bootloader - probably to show the before picture, but I thought I was supposed to start at that state. Also, the video just shows the starting state and ending state of the bootloader screen and does not show even a single step that one takes to perform the jbear S-OFF process.
6. When the jBear exe file tells you to do the wire trick, keep trying to do the wire trick until the software stops asking you to do it. I used a large insulated paper clip with the insulation stripped off a bit on each end. It is important to keep the paper clip straight in the pin#1 hole to make good electrical contact. You need to touch the other end of the paper clip briefly to the ground pin and then do it again after waiting 1.75 seconds. So this takes alot of trying.
7. I am on GB, and the jBear program installed the ENG hboot. The bootloader screen looks different than other peoples' screen. This is because they were on the ICS leak and received a different hboot program from hBear. My screen said "ENG S-OFF" and did not say Juoblahblahcan'st spell it. So, I naturally got help and repeatedly reflashed the hboot file, but never got the same screen as the other successful S-OFF people - this was another waste of my time due to incomplete directions.
8. I think we should just call it F**KBear until the wonderful developers change the name to something everyone can easily remember and spell.
In general the entire HTC user family is gratefull for this capability. It will probably provide us with valuable capabilities. For example, I have read S-OFF should allow us to RUU backwards to previous versions of official HTC/Verizon released operating systems.
Regards,
Howard