Woo Hoo!! Thank you, thank you! That was crystal clear and I have my Nonsensikal back.
Congrats.
I want to stop for a moment and emphasize a point - about what got you into this crisis in the first place: failure to check to see that a ROM file was valid before you flashed it
when using ROM Manager/ClockworkMod to flash ROMs
The Amon_RA recovery uses a protection mechanism known as "signature verification" which
makes it impossible to flash a corrupted ROM .zip file; on the other hand,
ROM Manager/ClockworkMod by default performs no such check! (You can turn it on in ROM Manager, but it seems to be broken - I tried it on a known-good ROM, and ClockworkMod claimed that it was bad
).
( BTW, Amon_RA has previously stated over on XDA that he will never add a bypass of signature verification in his recovery because he believes it to be irresponsible; I have to agree with him, and would say it is the fundamental defect of ROM Manager/ClockworkMod - especially because it has a strong appeal to people that are unfamiliar with the details of what goes on under the hood. )
There is a simple way to avoid this, though, whether you use ROM Manager or Amon_RA, and I strongly urge you to do this for everything you might flash in the future:
perform a "Jar Signer" verification test of a fresh ROM file by using scary alien's free market app "AFV" (Android File Verifier)**
The AF Eris forum is frankly littered with reports from people who tried to flash ROMs or other signed packages which were corrupted/truncated due to two reasons:
- they improperly dismounted the SD card from the PC immediately after copying a flashable .zip file from the PC. ("Safely Remove Hardware" needs to be used from the PC side, followed by turning off the export of the SD to the PC from the phone.)
- their download failed and they didn't take notice of it
In the case of people that are familiar with Amon_RA, the problem was less severe, because if they accidentally tried flashing a corrupted ROM file, the worst thing that would happen would be that their existing ROM on the phone would have had a factory reset performed on it - but the phone would still boot correctly. And, if they were using Amon_RA for nandroid backups, they could also simply do a restore to get right back to where they had previously been.
The current architecture of ROM Manager/ClockworkMod
requires that your ROM be bootable in order to start the ClockworkMod recovery correctly - so if something goes wrong with a bad flash, the only thing which remains for the user is Amon_RA - and then the nandroid backups which were performed by ClockworkMod are not (simply) available to the user.
So - avoid all this nonsense in the first place by
performing a signing verification on flashable .zip files by using AFV - whether you intend to use ClockworkMod or Amon_RA.
If you have read all this through and understood it, you might realize that there was "a third path" to getting back up running that was available to you after the initial hiccup:
Just use Amon_RA to flash a known good ROM that was already on your SD card. (Then, get ROM Manager from the market, and restore the Nandroid backup you had made previously using ROM Manager/ClockworkMod)
I didn't suggest that method because (a) I didn't know whether you had one on your card already, and (b) if you didn't, we would be going down a path where you might simply corrupt a different ROM by repeating an inappropriate file copying technique. At that time, I thought that less novel-writing would be required, but apparently that wasn't a good call on my part
LOL.
Having said all of this, I am not necessarily trying to tell you to avoid using ROM Manager or Clockwork-based Nandroid backups; as a matter of fact, the Nandroid backups that ClockworkMod makes are actually
far more complete than what Amon_RA does. OTOH, if you are going to use ROM Manager/ClockworkMod, you should probably also be familiar with how Amon_RA operates.
Apologies for turning you into a geek over the last two days - but now you should be more confident in using your phone and doing geeky things with it. (Note that now that you have the S-OFF bootloader on the phone, you could lose BOTH the OS and the recovery, and still be able to get your phone back using fastboot.)
OK, two last things: (a) get that PB00IMG.ZIP card out of the root folder of your SD card as scary alien instructed you - move it to a different folder, rename it or delete it. Then (b) practice one or twice cold-booting directly to recovery with "Vol-Up+End" (You can use that sequence with 1.49.2000 S-OFF, where you needed to go through the HBOOT menu when you had 1.47.0000 on the phone)
phew, another novel. One user at a time, we'll create an army.
eu1
** When responsible developers publish stuff for public consumption, they do two things: they publish the exact size of their file, and also provide a "MD5" file signature checksum. You will notice that Amon_RA and scary alien did that for their recovery images (which are not "signed" in the same way as the ROM .zip files) - and you can also check these MD5 signatures using scary alien's free "AFV" app
.
