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Help Best way to wipe and what to use instead of camera button

Seventeen

Seventeen

Newbie
Hey everyone,

I've installed a ROM (Virtuous Unity) on a DHD with repeated random force closes and am beginning to suspect an bad wipe. I merely let Clockwork wipe data and cache, and from what I've seen that's hardly enough.

What's the best way to do a full, complete, or whole wipe? Also, when I wipe, do I keep root and S-OFF ? What will be my running ROM be? Do I go back to stock or keep my existing ROM?

Another question I have concerns the lack of a camera button. A lot of recovery ROMS need you to use your phone's camera button to navigate menus and such. Since the Desire HD doesn't have one, what are you supposed to use instead? The only buttons are the volume rocker, usually used for up and down, and the power button which is either used for select or back.

Thanks in advance!
 
When you say full wipe, do you mean everything? So you're ROMless?

Wiping Cache and a factory reset should be enough to install most ROMS. There are zips out there which will wipe all partitions and format them using the EXT4 file system.

What other recovert ROMs use the camera button? Clockwork should be all you need. :)
 
Well, I want to install a new ROM after wiping so I thought it wouldn't matter if any existing ROMs were wiped. If all ROMs are wiped though, what's left? A hollow shell of nothingness or stock ROM? I guess what I need is:

Wipe as much as I possibly can (data, cache, boot, SD card, etc) while still keeping the ability to install custom ROMS and restore from backups.

I don't need to keep any apps, contacts, data, stuff on SD card, anything like that. However I'm not trying to unroot, install a RUU or do a time warp to when I bought it. I hope I'm making sense!

I was reading this tutorial:

**Tutorial** Wiping prior to installing a Rom, and restoring apps & data - Droid Forum - Verizon Droid & the Motorola Droid Forum

Which reccomended RZR Recovery- one that uses the camera button as select. Apparently Clockwork's data and cache wipe isn't enough. I'm quite prone to believe that, as I'm getting multitudes of force close with just a data+cache wipe with CWR.

This is Virtuous Unity on a Desire HD.

Edit: I forgot to mention- I found this earlier: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=868720

Is that what I'm after?
 
According to the article, it's the wipe in ROM Manager which isn't enough, if you reboot into Clockwork and do it manually, that should be more than adequate.

Some ROMs will format the relevant partitions when installing (LeeDroid does & CM7 does I think), but by the looks of things, you have to do that yourself in Clockwork.

A full wipe would mean you have nothing on your handset, you'd still be able to get into recovery via hboot as far as I'm aware though, there is a tool you can use which wipes all partitions from clockwork, and as long as the ROM zip file is on the SD Card too, you can wipe, then install the ROM straight away.
 
All right, I guess Clockwork will remain even after the wipe? There's no problem with formatting to ext4 if the ROM doesn't specifically make use of it right?

I also guess I will just have to live without camera-button-needing ROMS.

Thanks for the help!
 
Yeah, clockwork will remain after the wipe. And no, I presume there would be no issues with the EXT4 wipe if the ROM didn't require it. Can't confirm though, sorry.
 
All right, for future reference!:

Clockwork remains
S-OFF remains
Root remains
SD card is untouched in this specific method (Clockwork + [CWM-RECOVERY-APP]FULL WIPE-WIPE.zip-DHD/DZ/G2/Vision.EXT3&4 WIPE,UPDATED 23/05/2011 - xda-developers)

I used the Full Wipe to EXT4.zip (there are a few in that link for different purposes) with no issues. Although my ROM doesn't need EXT4 or make special use of it, it runs just like normal and without any problems. There may be some inherent benefits of using EXT4 but nothing different is due to my ROMs use of it.

Strangely, a lot of my apps from before the wipe remained. I did not have an SD card in the phone, but a lot of these were listed as on "SD Card". I noticed a few system settings were the same as well. I had to uninstall a lot of apps and delete caches that were still on the phone.

This is weird because if this "Full Wipe" process doesn't get rid of them, then what does? Of note is that when I ran the Full Wipe.zip in Clockwork, the process took less than 10 seconds, which was shorter than I expected for such a process. I'm guessing it did some kind of 'quick' wipe.

I suspect it was a 'quick' wipe due to the short processing time and remnant apps. I noticed that at first, only one or two apps were left over. Then, as I started uninstalling them, more of these old apps would appear. Some of these apps were corrupt, others had force closes, others like Angry Birds would load, but would not open any levels.

I no longer have any force closes however. I'm not sure if this is because of the so called 'full wipe' or because I manually uninstalled all these leftover apps. (I did not uninstall any of them prior to the time I was getting force closes)

Conclusion: Whatever, it works :)

Edit: The 'leftover' apps may not have been left over. I've read that if you link your original Gmail address to your phone after wiping, the phone will automatically download the apps you'd downloaded from the Market using your Gmail account. That would explain why they only appeared gradually for me, instead of all at once.
 
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