i don't see how flashing a camera patch should mess his phone up. since that's all he did. He thought he was flashing a ROM, turns out it was a camera flash. ok big deal.
everything that happens after that is a mystery to me. why did his restore not work? in my experience, when I download a ROM that comes with goodies, rom manager does not ask me to install one of the goodies, it asks me to isntall the ROM, and it will isntall the goodies afterwards, so if the wrong file was flashed through ROM Manager, then it was ROM managers fault, because all he did was select the rom he wanted (rubix) waited for it to download, and when it was finished, selected wipe data/cache and download. the phone then rebooted right back to his OS, instead of rebooting into recovery and flashing the ROM.
I know when you flash a new rom you have to login again, but a ROM was never flashed, just a camera patch, and a failed attempt at a restore.
so basically what youre saying is, most ROMs I can isntall with either rom manager or bootstrap, but some roms require bootstrap? I'm assuming the ROMs that require bootstrap would include that in the instructions. is this correct? i was under the impression bootstrap played a more vital role in the downloading/installing of ROMs.
also this just came to my mind, that may or may not answer part of my question. when you wipe data and cache, that doesn't cause you to have to login to your google account, but if you do a factory reset in recovery, is that different from wiping data and cache? that may explain why he had to re login after the reboot. (still doesn't explain the restore not working, or the phone being unrooted)
it can be fun when you hit the heartstopping moments, as long as you can figure them out. otherwise it's just annoying. my friend is now completely turned off from custom ROMs and what-not because of how complex it is and how it never seems to work right for him. On top of that, he has to listen to myself and our other coworker (who has a droid 1) talk about all the things we are doing so easily and smoothly with our phones. I feel bad for the guy. none of us had any idea it would be so hard to hack the droid x, that's all I meant by "should have got a dinc". it's just so much easier.
both our phones will look like dinosaurs anyway compared to the new tegra 2 processor phones coming out very soon.