Help Fixing a bricked Eris

[soulesswanderer]

Ok, so I have something that's beyond my technical prowess right now.

So I sold my old UNROOTED Eris on ebay. The stupid ***** somehow screwed up the phone in just two hours of having it and files a buyer protection case against me, after four days of fighting with ebay and them about it I ended up getting the shaft because "the item was not in the condition described" BS!!! It was two months old with zero screwing around, even just a few basic apps on it.

So I get the phone sent back, lo and behold it's stuck in a boot loop. Better yet it's showing S-OFF. Hmm... Oh yeah, what I was telling ebay that happened did indeed. She either rooted and failed or flashed a bad ROM.

Where the problem I'm having is, I want to fix the bad root, flash a good ROM on it and make some money off it again, but I can't do anything on the phone. All I get is a menu that says fastboot and recovery, nothing on the SD card works, its just a blank drive with no folders.

Ideas?

 

[MrDangerous]

Download the verizon RUU, start it up and look in your temp folder for something like ROM.ZIP

rename it to pb00img.zip and copy it to your SD card.

Power on with the volume down and Hboot will attempt to install it.

Then re-root (if applicable) and sell again.

 

[Podivin]

The first thing I'd try is a factory reset, this may give back control of the phone (credit to Frisco for instuctions).
- Shut down your device.

- While holding down both the volume-down toggle and the send or "phone" button, press the power button.

- Wait a moment, and a screen will come up: read the print completely and follow directions, it'll walk you through the simple process.


If that doesn't work then the next thing I'd try is to flash a new ROM. Download a ROM (I'd suggest xtrSense to make the phone look as much like stock as possible) and place the zip file on the root (not in any folder) of the Sd card. This assumes that she just deleted everything off the SD card, not that it has become non-functional.
The boot into Recovery.
Under 'wipe' wipe both data and dalvik.
Then import the zip for the ROM you downloaded.
Once you get the 'imported successfully' message you can reboot the phone.
It will take several minutes for this first boot, as the phone places all the parts of the ROM in their appropriate places.

 

[MrDangerous]

If you get it going again and re-sell it. Sell it as rooted so that you won't have to worry about someone messing it up again trying to re-reroot it.

If they tried to put Clockwork on it that may have screwed it up. There's a warning on XDA about Clockwork and potential bricking.

 

[erisuser1]

If it has the S-OFF bootloader on it, the fastest way to install a new ROM is to flash the Amon_RA recovery from the PC using fastboot.

That looks something like this:

fastboot flash recovery recovery-RA-eris-v1.6.2.img

You don't need the Android SDK on the PC, you just need:

1) the USB driver installed (e.g. as a side effect of installing HTC Sync or having run an RUU - but beware that actually installing an RUU will install a S-ON bootloader, so if you use an RUU to install the driver, just run it up until the part where it would start the install. That gets the drivers installed but doesn't touch the phone.)

2) a copy of fastboot for your PC O/S (e.g. from developer.HTC.com - look midway down this page)

3) The Amon_RA image file (directly from Amon_RA's post on XDA in the Eris dev forum)

4) A ROM to install

Make absolutely sure that you verify the md5 signature of the Amon_RA image file - fastboot performs no integrity checks.

After you have the Amon_RA recovery installed, boot into recovery from a cold start (Vol-Up+End), and apply whatever ROM you want - including the FlashBack21 ROM if you want to re-install stock 2.1

There are instructions on how to use the Amon_RA recovery here. (You can skip the part about making an initial backup because you clearly don't want to save the handiwork from the eBay tool you had to deal with).


I'm sorry that this is the circumstances under which you learn about root.


eu1

 

[soulesswanderer]

Alright, thanks everyone. Lots of options to try. Will let you know how it goes tonight.

Like I said it was just beyond my technical abilities at the moment. I've never had a bad flash occur yet, and have only been using ROMs for a couple months on my Incredible, and a friends Eris he gave me. It's been straightforward cause I haven't wanted to play around too much, just get the functionality I really wanted out of the phone and conserve the frickin battery.

But, this will help me get the inevitable out of the way for the future cause I know eventually I'll break something on either of the phones