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Root Desire rooting problem

S

srm1973

Lurker
Hi all,

Hope someone can help

The power button on my HTC Desire stopped working so I thought I'd root and install a custom room to use the trackpad as the unlock button

Rooted without any problems, installed custom rom but phone wont load past white HTC screen, I can boot into recovery mode but the volume button doesnt seen to move the options from fastboot to recovery/clear storage/simlock option , what to do?

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Did you do a factory reset before flashing the custom ROM? If not that would explain why it won't boot. Or if you did, what ROM did you flash - some have particular requirements and won't work without them (especially those based on the ROMs from more recent HTC devices).

Anyway, that's not really important right now, because you want to get into recovery in order to do anything (except maybe run an RUU, which will unroot the phone but should fix this problem). The problem is that if your power button is borked then you won't be able to select an option even if the volume button was working! It's also rather worrying that the volume keys aren't working in hboot.

One puzzle: if the power key is broken and volume buttons don't work, how did you get into hboot in the first place? That I don't understand, and it leaves me wondering whether I'm missing something.

If you can't select anything in the hboot menu then the only thing I can suggest is running an RUU. You can download one from shipped-ROMs, connect the phone to a PC via usb, boot into the bootloader and it should go into "fastboot usb" mode. If it does, you can run the RUU on a PC (it's a windows .exe - the 2.3 upgrade has the .exe inside a zip archive). If you are unsure which to choose the 2.3 upgrade works with most phones (can only be rooted using revolutionary though, whereas a suitable Froyo can probably be rooted with unrevoked if you prefer that).

If you can get it working again, try installing WidgetLocker and setting "easy wake mode" in the Buttons and Inputs menu. I don't know whether that will work without root, but it's worth a try. Or you could try rooting again, and see if you can have a bit more luck with the custom ROM.
 
if i remove the battery and reinsert it whilst holding down power button volume it allows me in to recovery mode, but then i cant select any options
 
That that implies that the volume button is working, but it doesn't work when you are in the hboot menu. So I guess the phone is acting as if the power button was jammed on (if that were the case the volume key wouldn't work - I've tried this with my phone to test the theory).

But actually I think we're still talking slightly at crossed purposes: the white screen with the little green androids at the bottom isn't recovery - that's hboot. But you must have got into recovery to flash the custom ROM in the first place. So that's what puzzles me, how you did that? (I can think of a few possibilities, but would rather not speculate).
 
Ah so the screen with the skateboarding androids is hboot? I had been using mild wild v4 which I was updating to the latest version when the problem occurred

I have another HTC Desire, could I insert my sd card into that, wipe it clean and reinstall the custom rom?
 
The ROM isn't on the card. It was installed via recovery, from a zip file, onto the phone internal system partition. If you can't get into recovery you can't reinstall the ROM.
 
You could use another Desire to get a ROM .zip onto the sd card, but you still need to get the dodgy phone into recovery in order to use that file. That's the fundamental problem here: how to get that one into recovery?

So from MildWild you could boot directly into recovery, except that's in the power button menu, so presumably you couldn't use that?

Do you have any vital data on this phone? It might be that you just need to do a factory reset (if you didn't clear cache and dalvik before flashing the updated ROM). And it might be possible to do that from fastboot:

* Install the fastboot program and drivers on your PC, as described here.

* Connect the phone to the PC by usb and boot into hboot. With any luck that will boot you straight into fastboot mode (or you can try booting while pressing the back button rather than volume down, which is how you boot directly to fastboot).

* Run fastboot on the PC, as described in the guide linked above. The commands "fastboot erase cache" and "fastboot erase data" should be equivalent to doing a factory reset.

If the problem is an incompatibility between the older and newer ROMs, that should get it booting, but obviously with all apps and data erased. If the problem was a bad ROM flash of some sort it won't. (Actually I'm not sure how this will work with MildWild's a2sd anyway).

There's a catch though: I'm not sure whether that will work if the phone is S-On (fastboot commands are more limited on an S-On phone, but I can't remember what does work). So if you are S-On it might be a waste of time setting it up.

Trouble is, I'm not coming up with any ways of getting into recovery without the keys working. Well, there's one that might work if you are S-Off, but it's sufficiently radical that I'm reluctant to suggest it.

Edit: Ah, Nicka has beaten me to the first point :)
 
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