Wednesday, November 3, 2010

How To Brick Your htc Incredible

I've had the pleasure of creating a beautiful little paper weight.

Back at OOW, Jake told me it would take one click to root my phone. I took him at his word. What I failed to gather, was hat he didn't mean one click, he meant "one click." As in some sort of multi-step process that requires me to read stuff. I don't read much. I just take things apart and attempt to put them back together.

Anyway, somehow I talked Anthony, one of Jake's teammates, to go ahead and play with my phone (i.e. root it). He did so while sitting at some bar in San Francisco, giving me wi-fi tethering for the win.

Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I decided to get super fancy and install one of the CyanogenMod ROMs, 6.0.2 to be exact. All went well using ClockworkMod, save for the fact that a certain server was down that didn't allow me to download the Google Apps ROM. Once I got that one, installed it and all seemed to be right in the world.

Until I started to get these android.process.email Force Close (FC) errors. Very annoying.

Guess what I did?

I tried to fix that.

Hence the reason for the post. At this point, I am receiving the following errors through ClockworkMod Recovery while attempting to mount /data: E:Can't mount /dev/block/mmcblk0p1 (file exists). Awesome sauce.

I'm simply trying to downgrade my phone back to stock so I can start all over with this mess. After following the instructions to load the PB1IMG.zip to the root of my sdcard, HBOOT -> BOOTLOADER says it can't find the image, which probably has to do with the inability of the system to mount the above drives before boot.

I'm currently reading A Harrowing Tale of Incredible Rooting as this seems to be the closest to my situation. I'm also reading [SOLVED] internal storage partitions screwed up.

Also, I've managed to access the phone directly using the Android Debug Bridge (ADB). I've even installed Eclipse and the Android plugin that goes along with it (that's not as useful as ADB though). ADP allows you to run shell commands directly on your phone.

Almost forgot, there seem to be quite a few YouTube videos on downgrading your Incredible which I've found very helpful. In particular the ones below.



I'll continue to update this page as I progress (or don't).

The bright side of all this is that I won't be intimidated by creating my first Android application. Seems fairly easy to do (now).

Update: 17:11 EST
I'm now working with @Android001 and others in an IRC chat.

So far, I've produced this awesomely wonderful logcat file.

Update: 18:11 EST
Back up and running!

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