Root changing roms? Long restart problems.

[joltheeds]

Hi,

I was naive and stupid and upgraded to the official 2.3 when it came out but quickly realised I hated it and wanted to root. So using the help of videos on youtube I followed guide to S-Off and root. So now when I turn my phone on, it goes through the black 'oxygen' logo after the HTC logo and I have screenshot abilities and superuser is also one of my programs. So i think I'm rooted.

However, this rom is not that great, i was wanting to change. I need my phone to last me just under a year now (upgrading /cancelling my contract in Feb 2013) and cant afford a new one now.

Is it easy to change to another rom?

Recently I've had problems when restarting my phone, it stays on the HTC white screen background forever and didn't nudge from there, I sort of temp solved that by pressing vol down and power and going through the revolutionary menu and doing a factory restore. Will changing to another rom potentially solve this problem? Even now when I restart my phone, it stays on the logo white screen for a lengthy period (about 40 seconds to a minute ) and I get worried that if it doesnt start, I am going to have to reformat again and install applications again!

Is changing to another rom a good idea? Is there another way to solve the restart problem? IF i was to switch rom, where could I get information/instructions on how to switch when phone already has another rom installed.
any help/advice would be great...
thank you.

 

[Hadron]

All of this stuff is doable, even straightforward, but before fiddling with your phone at this level I'd always recommend understanding what you are doing a bit better. There are a few guides and faqs in the All Things Root Guide sticky post in this forum, so it would probably be worth reading some of these first, then we'll be happy to answer any remaining questions.

Sorry, not trying to give you the brush-off, just I can only be online for a couple of minutes, so can't type a detailed explanation at the moment.

Things that certainly will help will be to know what ROM you have and what you want in a ROM - you say the current ROM is "not that great", but these things are highly subjective, and your "not that great" may be someone else's ideal and vice-versa.

As for your problem, I don't know why it locked up - we'd need more information. But 40 seconds or so on the splash screen doesn't sound excessive with many custom setups, so I don't think that's actually anything wrong.

 

[joltheeds]

As for your problem, I don't know why it locked up - we'd need more information. But 40 seconds or so on the splash screen doesn't sound excessive with many custom setups, so I don't think that's actually anything wrong.

Well had this been the case beforehand, it taking that long to restart or turn on, I wouldn't have battered an eyelid. But this hadn't happened before. I normally live in the UK, but I had been away (Asia) for 2.5 weeks, I had my phone on air-plane mode throughout and only turned it on to take photos or use WiFi when I was in WiFi zone. However one evening when I tried to turn it on and it stayed in the splash screen for over a few minutes, definitely over two minutes, so I opened the back cover and took the battery out to force it to turn off as the power button was no use in the splash screen.

After few minutes later, I re inserted the battery and turned on, and waited over an hour but it was froze onto the splash screen. I gave up hope as I thought phone had bricked.

After returning to the UK, I read somewhere about doing full restore, so I did just that, held the volume down button and press power. It gave me the options and it went through to the Revolutionary menu and I was able to do factory setting. I installed all apps that I use and later that evening, my battery was about to die. So I turned the phone off and took out the battery to insert a fully charged on in, and it turned on, but took a long time from splash screen, but I was relieved it was able to turn on.

However this morning phone started becoming slow so I thought it needed a reboot, but whilst doing that, it just stayed at the splash screen. Over 35 minutes it was on that screen so I thought I'd need to do a reformat again.

But it got me thinking, maybe I should try another rom as I fancied a change which led me to here, asking silly questions and writing essays!

 

[Hadron]

Yeah, 2 minutes, never mind 35, is too long.

Odd though: a factory reset clears user apps, settings, app data. So if that fixes a failure to boot it implies some corrupt or incompatible data. For that to recur, especially quickly, is very strange. Have you had any other oddities (rebooting when under load, running out of internal storage unexpectedly, ...)?

The procedure for changing ROMs is the same you'd have used to install a ROM in the first place. Copy the ROM zip to your SD card, back up any apps or data you wish to keep (using Titanium Backup or whatever), take a nandroid backup (i.e. a backup from recovery, which I think is what you mean by the "revolutionary menu"), factory reset, then use recovery to install the ROM ("install update from zip" or something similar). Reboot, restore your backups, and away you go. If there's a problem, back into recovery and restore the recovery backup.

However, different ROMs have different requirements. Always read the first couple of posts of a ROM's thread first before flashing, as this is where you'll find out what they are. For example, "newer Sense" ROMs almost always require a sufficiently large ext partition on your card, so if you don't have this the install will fail.

What ROM are you running? You mention the Oxygen logo, which is surprising as Oxygen is typically very stable.

 

[joltheeds]

Yeah, 2 minutes, never mind 35, is too long.

Odd though: a factory reset clears user apps, settings, app data. So if that fixes a failure to boot it implies some corrupt or incompatible data. For that to recur, especially quickly, is very strange. Have you had any other oddities (rebooting when under load, running out of internal storage unexpectedly, ...)?

The procedure for changing ROMs is the same you'd have used to install a ROM in the first place. Copy the ROM zip to your SD card, back up any apps or data you wish to keep (using Titanium Backup or whatever), take a nandroid backup (i.e. a backup from recovery, which I think is what you mean by the "revolutionary menu"), factory reset, then use recovery to install the ROM ("install update from zip" or something similar). Reboot, restore your backups, and away you go. If there's a problem, back into recovery and restore the recovery backup.

However, different ROMs have different requirements. Always read the first couple of posts of a ROM's thread first before flashing, as this is where you'll find out what they are. For example, "newer Sense" ROMs almost always require a sufficiently large ext partition on your card, so if you don't have this the install will fail.

What ROM are you running? You mention the Oxygen logo, which is surprising as Oxygen is typically very stable.

Hi,
firstly thank you for you explanations, you've made changing roms part sound not so difficult which I thought it might be.
above quoted bold part 1) Yes, there was a sort of oddity:
This morning the reason I had to do a reboot was as my phone was showing the memory full symbol, and usually when that happens, I go to 'manage apps' to find facebook on 14 to 20 MB, so I usually just clear data that to get my size to normal, however this morning, it wouldn't let me enter the 'manage apps' screen so hence I thought I should reboot as thought phone was freezing up. This was when the phone was on splash screen for over 35 minutes when I decided to take the battery out and do recovery.

for the quoted bold part 2), checking my about phone section:

Model number
HTC Desire

Android version
2.3.7

Baseband version
32.56.00.32U_5.17.05.23

Kernel version
2.6.35.14-stable
thalamus@Tc-99 #1

Mod version
Oxygen-2.3-Bravo

Build number
GWK74

There's probably some unneeded information there but hopefully contains all the info.
So, could changing to another rom potentially fix the long splash screen problem? Even now when I change batteries, I am worried in case it freezes on the splash screen and I will have to reformat. I am really wanting this phone to last me for another 10 months at least, would be ideal as my budget wont allow me to invest in a new one now.

 

[Hadron]

What I'd suggest is reading the root memory faq, linked from the All Things Root Guide sticky post. If you have low memory problems I suspect the a2sd section could help you (and applies to many roms).