Help Do I need to do a factory reset?

[swindelljd]

So my Dinc burned up it's battery today because it wasn't playing nicely with our office wifi router. It basically spent the whole day trying to connect, failing, scanning, trying to connect... you get the idea.

So just before I left it ran out of juice and shut down. When I got into my car, I did my normal routine which is plug it into the car charger and then turn it on to listen to my podcasts on my drive home. Except that I forgot it had run out of juice so when it booted it stopped at the "eye of Sauron" for a long time. When I say a long time I mean as long as if it were reinstalling Froyo long.

When it finally came up, pretty much anything that loads a process at boot that wasn't installed on the system partition (eg Skype) did a FC as soon as I got past the lock screen. Thinks like Google Finance, SportsTap, Mail, etc crashed at boot. And anything I opened including Google Market immediately show me the TOS screen as if it's the first time I've launched the app. However most things once I pass the TOS screen will immediately FC. It seems like the internal cache/system partition was corrupted during the loss of power shutdown or the subsequent restart.

Since I've tried a clean shut down, 4 or 5 times, I know that this won't solve problem.

So my questions are:
1) has anyone else experienced this kind of failure and how did you solve it
2) Should I use the factory reset option on the phone and then upgrade to Froyo with the update.zip(s) I have handy or go straight to the Froyo RUU that's floating around.
3) Is there any way to recover WITHOUT a factory reset of some sort? I expect this is a NO but thought I'd ask
4) Should I expect a factory reset to fix the phone or is it basically bricked at this point and I need to call VZW (my last resort)

Please let me know what you think.

thanks,
John

 

[HoochieCoo]

I've heard of people running into this before, in some cases after a "dirty" shutdown.

I would try reinstalling the apps that are FC'ing. For the preinstalled apps, if they are FC'ing, try clearing their cache & data.

It's not bricked since it boots. A factory reset would be your last resort since it will wipe your data (and you would have to reinstall apps after that anyway).

EDIT: If you are going to factory reset, I would go ahead and upgrade at that point. Might as well since you'll have to rebuild anyway.

 

[swindelljd]

It turns out everything that wasn't a pre-installed app was FC'ing so it was easier to just factory reset.

It actually reset to Froyo so I just restarted from there. Since I use appBrain, I had a solid list of apps that had been installed and though it took a couple of hours, I got it mostly back to where it was before.

Too bad some of my installed apps have been removed from the Marketplace. That's definitely one thing I liked about my old Palm, that I could download to apps to my PC for safe keeping. I know there are tools that allow backups of apk's but it's not quite the same.

One thing is for sure, reinstalling the apps from scratch was pretty fast compared to when I installed an app before the factory reset. I think that my app area had gotten fragmented and given what I know about solid state memory, installing new apps would require on the fly reorganization of that partition which used to make installs very janky.