Phone stuck on O2 screen.

[fidelio]

Hi,
I did a bit of a daft thing, and bought a non-working Desire off ebay. Actually, I thought it was working and I'd picked up a bargain, but it was only when I received it that I noticed it had, quite clearly, been sold for spares or repairs. It does power up and get to the O2 welecome screen and it will enter HBOOT where I can see
UNLOCKED
S-ON
HBOOT 1.03,000

It will go into fastboot but attempting to bring up recovery just results in the O2 screen again. I can't run any RUU's even with a goldcard, (error 155) and I get an error if I try to run the extracted zip from the SD

I saw someone here say that if you can boot up and get into HBOOT that in principle the phone can be fixed, but in the case I am tempted to think that I should just cut my losses and put it back on ebay. Any opinions?
Thanks!

 

[Tyseyh]

Have you tried the 2.3 RUU?
Don't think you require a gold card at all for that one since its not branded.
I don't remember what that error code means.

 

[fidelio]

Yes, tried 2.3 as RUU exe file and zip from SD. I feel a bit stupid about this. I saw the phone on ebay about 1 minute before it sold, saw a photo of it with the screen on (the o2 welcome screen!) and just thought 'Oooh, thats a bargain...' It was perfectly clear when I re-read the listing that the phone didn't work. Duh.. :stupido2:

 

[Hadron]

If you can get it into fastboot mode (from bootloader menu) that may do it. But if you can't boot you are prob doing that already.

Hboot 1.03 may be a problem, as that is newer than the one in the 2.3 ruu, so likely to stop it running anyway. There is a tutorial on xda about downgrading this hboot ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1550397) which may help - if you can make it work it flashes 2.3 in the process.

The phone has had the official htc bootloader unlock applied, so has been modded by someone who didn't know enough to know that there are better ways of doing that

 

[fidelio]

Thanks for the suggestions. Yeah, that's sort of what I thought. I found the downgrade tutorials but there doesn't seem to be any way to make them work on a phone which only goes as far as Hboot and Fastboot. It seems to be a total catch 22. If I could get a recovery working I might stand a chance, but I can't flash a recovery, hboot or anything else because I can't get S-off. To get S-off I'd need to downgrade hboot, but I can't because I'd need s-off to......etc

 

[Hadron]

OK, three different things that might be worth a try. One is trivial. The other two both require either fastboot or adb to be set up, so check out the "adb and fastboot faq", linked from the Desire All Things Root forum's All Things Root Guide sticky post, which will tell you how to set these up. I've listed them in order of increasing effort/difficulty.

1) The trivial one: do a factory reset.

From the hboot menu, select "recovery". What do you get? I suspect it will be the stock recovery with very few options (but if you see something that says "ClockworkMod", "Amon Ra" or just "Ra", or "4Ext" then you already have a custom recovery, in which case we are seriously in business!). Look for an option to erase all data or factory reset, and try that. Then reboot and see whether it gets any further.

2) Try to install a custom recovery.

You have HTC's unlocked bootloader, though you are still S-On. So the question is, does the unlocked bootloader let you flash a custom recovery by itself? On some other HTC phones it seems it does, so it's worth trying

Go to the 4Ext Touch recovery thread at XDA. In the first post you'll find a link for a "direct download (Desire GSM)". Download the recovery .img there to your computer (I'm suggesting this recovery as it works on any GSM Desire).

Connect the phone to the computer, and from the hboot menu select "fastboot". Assuming you have fastboot set up on your computer (as described in that faq), check the connection by typing the command "fastboot devices" (again, as described in the faq). If that responds with your phone's serial number you are good to go.

If it's worked so far, use the "fastboot flash recovery recovery.img" command to flash the 4Ext recovery (where "recovery.img" should be replaced by the name of the recovery img file you found in the zip you downloaded above).

Now I don't know whether the official unlock will let you flash recovery, but if it does then you are home and dry. With a custom recovery you can not only clear any corrupt data from the phone (what we tried in option 1) but you can also install a completely new ROM. Unless you want S-Off as well the 1.03 HBOOT is no longer a problem.

3) Try to run the downgrade method without android being bootable

Try putting the phone into recovery mode (from the hboot menu) and see whether it will then respond to adb (which you set up as described in the faq).

If it does then I think you can probably follow that downgrading tutorial. You don't actually need a Goldcard if you use the official 2.3 RUU, and the rest seems to be adb commands. You need to get the PB99IMG.zip file onto your SD card, but you can do that with a card reader or even try "adb push PB99IMG.zip /sdcard/PB99IMG.zip" (which will take a while as it's a big file!).

Note that these are just things I've thought up, so no guarantees that any of them will work. If the problem is deeper than some corrupt data (likely IMO) the factory reset will do nothing, but it's no effort to do it. I don't know whether the official bootloader unlock is sufficient to let you flash recovery. And it's possible the phone won't respond to adb when in recovery mode (though it should). But there's nothing to lose by trying at this point.