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Help Need help with a bricked Desire

C

careymahoney

Lurker
Hello sorry to bother you all but was following your threads but am a bit uncertain as to what to do with my bricked phone. It has the four triangles with exclamation marks when on usb, but when unplugged will sometimes go to:

BRAVO PVT1 SHIP S-ON
HBOOT-1.02.0001
MICROP-031d
TOUCH PANEL-SYNT0101
RADIO-5.11.05.27
Jul 22 2011, 16:19:16

RUU

with 2 triangles with exclamation marks at each bottom corner.

Any help would be appreciated. I should mention it was previously bootlooping and freezing on the HTC screen, then I tried flashing ROM, then the above happened. I read somewhere some of the early HTC Desire phones had overheating motherboard that was replaced. I thought maybe a ROM upgrade would help but didn't at the time hence the present problem.
 
Can you remember what the last messages were when you tried to run the RUU?

To be honest, my best guess right now would be to see if you can run the RUU again when it is showing the white screen with RUU on it. Start with the phone cool if you suspect overheating - leave it turned off and not charging for a while first (but have the battery well charged first - don't want to run the RUU with low power). Same RUU - the 2.3 upgrade - since you won't be able to run an older one now that you have hboot 1.02.

I'm afraid that a different ROM will not help with overheating :(
 
Will try that now Hadron. Thanks. Problem is I don't think I had USB debugging etc on when I tried the factory reset previously :(

Just tried and got:

ERROR [152]: IMAGE UPDATE ERROR
 
Do you know which image it was trying to update?

You don't need USB debugging in order to run an RUU. In fact, until you can boot into Android it doesn't matter at all (and when you can the problem is fixed).
 
Hi Hadron and thanks for being really helpful. Nice friendly forum this.

The RUU is this one:

RUU_HTC Desire Android 2.3 Upgrade (Gingerbread)
 
Yeah, I knew that from your hboot version (I've been doing this a while ;)).

What the RUU does is flash a series of images - boot, radio, recovery, hboot, system. Errors updating some images are worse than others. That's the main drawback with running an RUU on a phone that might have a motherboard problem - if it glitches while updating the hboot or radio that's very bad (though hboot update takes about one second, so you'd be very unlucky to glitch then). If it gave an error during the system update (the ROM, the longest one) then you could try again (or redownload the RUU and check the md5 of the download to ensure you have a good copy).
 
Sounds very complicated. Sometimes Radio fails, sometimes something else. I tried asking this question on XDA forums, but they seem very hardcore and not friendly like here. They were talking about as I am S-ON to:

If you're S-ON it eliminates the possibility of you having a custom bootloader, and the only possibility now is that the RUU was corrupted or you
used the wrong RUU for your device. Therefore, for this process you need a goldcard.
[STEP1]- Create the goldcard from the tutorial
[STEP1]- Use the WWE RUU
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, that's XDA for you. Can be a good place to get technical information, but there is often an excess of attitude there.

Anyway, with the 2.3 RUU you don't need a goldcard, so that's simpler ;). But sometimes these things do go wrong, and it doesn't mean that it's anything you did. My worry is that if the phone is a bit flaky that increases the risk - the phone will be active while flashing the RUU, and if it suffers from overheating when active, well you see where the risk comes in.

On the other hand, I don't think you've many options but to try the RUU right now.

If you downloaded it from shipped-ROMs, they provide an md5 hash code, which you can use to verify that the file downloaded correctly. There's a thread here describing this procedure and linking to a few utilities for doing this. It's the whole package you'd verify (the 2.3 upgrade there comes in a zip, with the RUU inside the zip file, so I'm assuming it's the package as downloaded that the code is for rather than after unzipping). You could try this just to make sure you have a good copy.
 
Hey Hadron, did as you suggested. It was doing the stuff really well and then had the screen:

ERROR [152]: IMAGE UPDATE ERROR

The Rom Update Utility cannot update your Android phone.

Please get correct ROM update Utility and try again

When I unplug from USB to do recovery this screen came up:

same thing as my first message in this thread followed by this:

Parsing...[download ZIP]
[1] RADIO_V2 - Fail-PU
[2] SPLASH-OK
[3] RECOVERY-OK
[4] SPLASH2-OK
[5] RADIO_CUST-OK
[6] BOOTLOADER-OK
[7] USERDATA-OK
[8] SYSTEM-OK
[9] BOOT-OK
Partition update fail!
Update Fail!

There are two triangles with exclamation marks in them at each of the bottom corners of the screen
 
Oh, a radio partition update fail. I'm afraid that's as bad as it gets.

You could try running the RUU again, but it's likely that this is the problem you had from the first time you ran it, and that it will just keep failing in the same place. That's generally the case when you get these - very occasionally it works on a later attempt, or when using a different RUU (but with the 1.02 hboot there is no different RUU that will run). But in most cases once you get this message it's game over.

The problem is that the radio firmware controls a number of hardware functions, and if that gets corrupted there's nothing we end users can do - the only people who can fix that are HTC.

If you bought the phone less than 2 years ago you are still in warranty, but with a PVT1 device I guess that's unlikely now.

It's a real long shot, but it might be worth trying the other way of running a RUU: place a file called PB99IMG.zip on your sd card, boot into the bootloader, and if it asks you whether you want to update say "yes". There's a method for extracting a PB99IMG.zip from a RUU, which is described in point 4 of the "initial steps" in this thread. Follow that, rename the ROM.zip file to PB99IMG.zip (case sensitive - and make sure Windows doesn't add an extra ".zip" on the end to give PB99IMG.zip.zip!). This does the same as running the RUU on the computer. However, it's quite likely that it won't work with the phone in this state, but there's not a lot to lose right now.
 
Actually I've just thought of something - there may be one more RUU you can try.

The official HTC bootloader unlock process for the Desire requires a newer hboot - 1.03 - which is installed by an RUU you download during this process. That should be able to run on your phone. It's actually Froyo rather than GB, and once you've installed that there won't be any more options - there really is no other RUU you can run after that one. But if you have no warranty and the GB RUU won't run this is the one thing left that just might.
 
Hi Hadron have tried this and get:

ERROR [190]: ROM IS NOT UPDATED

Your ROM version is not the latest version.
Please upgrade to 2.29.405.14 to apply this RUU to be able to unlock your bootloader.

Then it gives some instructions about doing stuff on the phone and then running the RUU again.
 
That's annoying. I'd hoped that since you had hboot 1.02 and this one has 1.03 it would run (as that's what stops you running older RUUs - they have an earlier hboot). Looks like they've gone and left the Gingerbread ROM's hboot out of the compatability check :(

And the trouble is that anything you need to do "on the phone" isn't possible because it won't boot in its current state.
 
Got a suggestion to wrap it in a plastic bag and then stick it in the freezer for 2o minutes then immediately run the gingerbread RUU. It worked !! But now back to the original boot loop problem :(
 
OMG,... Exactly same problem and same output for me!!!! I was sooo happy for a moment that I found this thread and scrolled down for the solution.. Oops!

Careymahoney - Is there anything you tried after this ?

Hadron - Thanks for all your inputs. Is this a hardware motherboard issue or something that HTC support guys can fix it ? It all started for me becos of frequent auto phone restart
 
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