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Help Desire A8181 stuck on boot after rest

C

cptreptile

Lurker
Dear all,

I bought a 2nd hand HTC A8181 for my wife, she played around with it and tried to reset all data and information. (which logically seems the right thing to do for a used mobile).
However now its stuck on the HTC logo screen and wont boot.

I have tried to press the -volume and power (then release the power while leaving on volume) inorder to get some kind of boot menu - but nothing pops up.

I tried to follow instructions to upgrade HTC Desire A8181 to Gingerbread 2.3.3, but it didnt work (i get error that battery should be at least 30% charged, while it seems fully charged (green light)

I think the solution should be simple, since all she did was a reset from a menu point and not playing around with firmwares.
 
Hi cptreptile, and welcome to AF :)

So what does happen if you boot the phone while pressing the volume down key? Unless the key is broken it's hard to see how that can fail.

As an alternative, try booting while pressing the back key. This should give you a different bootloader menu ("fastboot"), which is the one you actually need to run the update. But I'd suggest checking for other problems first. So if you can get into the menu, do the keys work to let you select items? Can you change between hboot and fastboot menus? And what does it say at the top of the screen (this should give information about your hardware and firmware - may not mean much to you, but will to some of us :)).

If you can't get into either menu then it's really strange!

Also, have you tried a simple fix: pull the battery out (don't try to shut down first) and leave it out for a couple of minutes, then reinsert and try to boot the phone. Sometimes that's enough to bad bits from the system.
 
Dear Hadron!

Thanks for your reply :)

I pressed the back key and power and i can see the fast boot menu with the following details:
BRAVO PVT4 SHIP S-OFF
HBOOT - 6.93.1002
MICROP - 051d
TOUCH PANEL - SYMW0101
RADIO - 5.09.05.30_2
Aug 10 2010 17:52:18

Following this menu, i find the the volume down not working, the volume up working but need to press it very hard.

shall i click on the recovery?
 
Ah, ok. So you haven't modified the firmware, but the previous owner may have. That "S-Off" usually means the phone has been modified, though a few came that way (most would say "S-On").

Was there any pink writing at the top of the screen? If so, what does it say?

You can try recovery. If that is unmodified you will get a black screen with a red triangle. I think you have to press the menu key to get any options, and "clear storage" is the only useful one (should be equivalent to what you already did).
If instead you get a menu of options straight away it's a custom recovery. In this case tell us what it says at the top (the name of the recovery version is usually there).
 
at the fast boot the pink title is: - Revolutionary -
menu poitns i can choose:
bootloader
reboot
reboot bootloader
power down

when i go to the bootloader, i get new menu (i think that would be the hboot)
i clicked on revocery, i get black screen with the hat icon title of the screen is ClockwordMod Recovery v5.0.2.0
in this screen i did now "wipe data / factory reset, but that didnt help.
 
do i have to install the OS?i guess the remove all data formatted it self and left the boot loader.
and if so what OS / version i need to install?the gingerbread is good?
 
Factory reset shouldn't have affected the ROM (OS and system apps) at all. That's what's odd.

Ok, so this phone was rooted and its software has been modified. But if it just says Revolutionary then at least it has standard storage partitions (if it hadn't we might have had to change that, depending on what software you want).

My guess is that it was running a custom ROM that was ported from a more recent HTC phone and doesn't fit in the Desire. These work by storing part of the system software in a partition on the sd card, and I guess the factory reset cleared that partition. Just a guess, but would explain why a factory reset left it unbootable.

So yeah, you need to install a new system. You can either install custom software or a standard HTC build. The methods are different. Custom ROMs give you more options, and if you want to install a lot of apps would be better, but if you didn't know it was rooted you might prefer stock software to start (can change later). Or a rooted version of the stock software might suit? I'll be back online later and will give some links then.

The good news is that this is fixable :)
 
So, some possibilities.

The official Ginerbread update can be obtained from HTCdev.com (filter on "Desire", type "other", android version 2.3, and it's the "RUU Upgrade") or shipped-ROMs.com (where the 2.3 upgrade is near the bottom of the list). Either way, unpack the file (rar or zip respectively) and you'll find an "RUU" (ROM Upgrade Utility), which is a Windows .exe, in there. To use it, boot the phone into fastboot mode, connect to a PC via usb, and run the RUU on the computer. That will load the HTC Gingerbread release, and also remove your custom recovery. The phone will still be S-Off, so it's not too hard to install another custom recovery later if you want to.

For a custom ROM, one option might be a rooted version of the stock Gingerbread. I found teppic74's ROMs to work well, but I believe that they will only load with an older custom recovery. You can find download links for those in this post. Otherwise this looks like a newer rooted stock ROM. The installation procedure for a ROM like this is: download the zip file, copy to your sd card (you can mount the card on usb when in recovery, or use a card reader), go into recovery, factory reset (if you haven't already - which you have!), "install zip from sd", select the zip file and confirm, reboot when installed. These would look and behave very similar to the official gingerbread, but have a few more options. The second one may give you more app storage out of the box if, as I suspected in the previous post, the sd card has a second partition.

Or if you are feeling more radical there are a range of other custom ROMs available.

You might be surprised to know that the official RUU is slightly more risky, because it will try to replace all software on the phone (including critical pieces such as the radio firmware). It's not a large risk, but I should mention it.

You might also note from that that I don't consider the ROM (OS and system software) to be "critical" in that sense - a bad or corrupt ROM can simply be replaced, one way or another. :)
 
Hadron!!

Thank you very much for your detailed help, as well for the warm welcome to the Android world !

I have installed the gingerbread that i already have downloaded, the installationg went smoothly when turned it in the fast boot.

I use an iPhone since few months, played a lot with it, and now i know that my home is the open source community :)
the options are endless compared to the iOS.

I will surely get one for my self soon, and try a custom rom as you suggested, i hope skype will work on it.
 
I M using htc desire 2.3.3 and almost finish root using revolutionary but I Unable to install the superuser from sd card.
When I click the "install from sdcard" OR any other tab from revolutionary menu, it doesnt function.
 
Hadron said:
So, some possibilities.

The official Ginerbread update can be obtained from (filter on "Desire", type "other", android version 2.3, and it's the "RUU Upgrade") or (where the 2.3 upgrade is near the bottom of the list). Either way, unpack the file (rar or zip respectively) and you'll find an "RUU" (ROM Upgrade Utility), which is a Windows .exe, in there. To use it, boot the phone into fastboot mode, connect to a PC via usb, and run the RUU on the computer. That will load the HTC Gingerbread release, and also remove your custom recovery. The phone will still be S-Off, so it's not too hard to install another custom recovery later if you want to.

For a custom ROM, one option might be a rooted version of the stock Gingerbread. I found teppic74's ROMs to work well, but I believe that they will only load with an older custom recovery. You can find download links for those in. Otherwiselooks like a newer rooted stock ROM. The installation procedure for a ROM like this is: download the zip file, copy to your sd card (you can mount the card on usb when in recovery, or use a card reader), go into recovery, factory reset (if you haven't already - which you have!), "install zip from sd", select the zip file and confirm, reboot when installed. These would look and behave very similar to the official gingerbread, but have a few more options. The second one may give you more app storage out of the box if, as I suspected in the previous post, the sd card has a second partition.

Or if you are feeling more radical there are a range of other custom ROMs available.

You might be surprised to know that the official RUU is slightly more risky, because it will try to replace all software on the phone (including critical pieces such as the radio firmware). It's not a large risk, but I should mention it.

You might also note from that that I don't consider the ROM (OS and system software) to be "critical" in that sense - a bad or corrupt ROM can simply be replaced, one way or another. :)
Click to expand...


Thank you very much Hadron,I finally updated to gingerbread after days of searching for an update! Thank you!!!
 
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