htc desire a8181 help needed

[jij]

i feel so chuffed with u!
whilst waiting for a response from u(the all knowing android 1!) & seeing some fb commands, i did
fastboot boot C:\....\recovery.img, which gave
downloading 'boot.img'...
OKAY [0.562s]
booting...
OKAY [0.000s]
finished. total time:0.593s

then 4eXT recovery touch batt : 62% | 1:13 came up. is there a guide to use it?

when 4eXT recovery touch on screen, i typed fb devices, the serial num nvr showd. i typed fb reboot recovery, which gives < waiting for device > just wait?

so 0 can reverse the vol buttons prob?, they seem sound!

 

[jij]

is it possible the fb reboot recovery, might work, if i ran steps again, & not touch usb wire at all?

iv not seen anything on the screen, bar htc & 3 boarders for near 2 wks - i feel like I got cream, & all because uv given of ur expertise!

ps if u flash recovery.img, then did it again, would there be 2 on sd, ie recovery.img1 & r..2?.

clear data/cache & reset system etc is it tricky?

 

[Hadron]

Flashing recovery again would just replace what you have with another copy. The recovery image isn't actually installed to the SD card: there is a partition in the internal storage called "recovery" and the image is installed to that.

What you've actually done is something I'd forgotten about: you have used fastboot to load and boot a copy of the recovery from your computer! The reason I'd forgotten that is that with the phone I had after the Desire (a HTC One) HTC removed the ability to "fastboot boot" with one of their first updates, so that option no longer worked. Of course the Desire is an older phone, so still has it. So you do have a way of using it after all

So with 4EXT booted you should be able to find a menu of options in it. I actually had it running the other day but can't recall what I did: I imagine I touched something on the screen to bring me to that, so look for an on-screen button or similar (otherwise try swiping the screen). I remember that it didn't puzzle me for very long, and I've not seen 4EXT running for many years, so I'm assuming it was fairly obvious.

A factory reset (which just clears data+cache) should be very easy: there will be a button to select just that. And there will be another one for selecting zips to install. And probably another for formatting the SD card. I can have a look later, but I'm not near my Desire at the moment to check it. There is a 4Ext site here, but there's very little on it and I don't think there's anything that will help you (this is another project that I think has been abandoned years ago).

 

[jij]

as u said its a bit behind the curve, i did wipe data\cache, it came back as was out of box, but as i couldnt use my 3g sim, i think it may have wiped the set up as was, unless its not unlocked to use on 3 network, it said 'no sim', also how can i remove undo beanstalk, android 2.3.6 seem smoother!?

i did a reset, all buttons bar vol's work

is it possible to get it back to before prob state? minus vol key prob? i guess i should have tried restore 1st? seems il have to try the beanstalk in the hope i can get to ring our if needed?

on beanstalk, it shows'no sim card emergency calls only' + flashing on screen at times

 

[jij]

as u said its a bit behind the curve.

i did a reset, all buttons bar vol's work

is it possible to get it back to before prob state? minus vol key prob?

did the recovery.img again, factory reset left it as beanstalk

if all else fails & i ran it through the android 2.3 ruu, would it override it, being much older?
not tech savvy, me

 

[jij]

I feel ur 1 of a kind! i So appreciate u & ur help!!

i had a brain wave, scand ur help notes, & as u clearly said, download rom.zip Ie beanstalk? + Gapps - i had PB.....zip on sd already from looking.

i did the fastboot boot c:\.....recovery.img, which took me into 4eXT & from there, installed Gapps 4.4.4 & rom.zip, runs smooth

it tells me 'mobile network not available', phone is 3g & my network provider only 3g+

any way to get it up & running? must i accept google location bits at start

im thinking now, the phone was possibly unlocked but my 1st contract was an orange provided 1, so orange unlocked?

 

[jij]

false alarm, having follow it help, correctly & being helpd by the shop to realise a naff error on my part - i can use the phone...

a BIG Thanks! goes out to u ***** ie 5 stars.

is there a way to go back to the original htc out the box look - but like with Windows, change from Vista to Windows 7, keep the look in beanstalk, would be good!

can't work out the button prob, they feel as good as new & then menu...work fine, as far as I can see

 

[Hadron]

Hah, I was just typing a few things to check and then you post that it's working! So I can forget all of that.

Keeping the original HTC look with the Beanstalk ROM probably isn't possible. You might be able to make the desktop look a bit like it using a suitable launcher and widgets, though that would have been easier in 2011, when there were more people making clock widgets etc that looked like the HTC ones, that it would be now when finding them will be harder. Will probably take some work. Making things like the phone app, calendar, system menus look like the original HTC is probably not possible. The problem is that the actual HTC apps won't run on anything other than a HTC ROM: they all rely on other parts of the HTC software framework being present, so even if we could find the original apps they wouldn't work. To get the full HTC look you'd need to run something like the 2.3 RUU, which would replace absolutely everything with stock HTC firmware.

If you ever decide you need it, the 2.3 RUU should work. I know the current Android software is newer, but that's only the ROM, and it's not a HTC ROM anyway. An RUU can't be used to downgrade firmware, but your underlying system firmware is dated August 2010 (from the hboot page), so the 2.3 RUU is definitely newer than that. Also you are S-Off, which means that a lot of security checks are disabled, and hence I'm pretty sure you could actually run an older RUU and downgrade your firmware if you wanted to.

One warning about S-Off though: as Ben Parker told his nephew Peter, "with great power comes great responsibility". What S-Off does is disable some checks that an HTC phone normally enforces. This gives you extra options that HTC don't normally allow, and allows you ways of recovering from problems that an S-On phone couldn't use. But it also means that the phone won't protect you from yourself, so if you try to use an incompatible RUU or erase something you really shouldn't it will let you do it. So it's very important to know what a command does before you execute it.

 

[jij]

bless!!!!

i found(apart from ur 1s) the fastboot commands in about 20K? articles! is there any where they come all together?? i did type fastboot (in admin command prompt) then return & a list was generated, but im not u!! with a priceless mind, tech wise to be able to figure it out - i think spanish might be a walk in the park for me to grasp, than all things computing!

if ur a pint man (im not, but the rare occassion) id love to buy u a pint - uv floord me with ur milk of human kindness, the world badly needs MORE of it!!!!

i did
fastboot devices then enter/return
fastboot boot recovery C:\Users..........\recovery.img then enter/return
fastboot boot c:\Users..........\recovery.img then enter/return which caused 4eXT - if i had wiped cache/dalvik would it have saved the htc settings? or would beanstalk had over written it anyway?

i look at the phone, & bar a few drops, it looks ok - why would the vol button behave as do? is it a must

ps i thought phone was acting up, because i nvr ticked google boxes on set-up, not because id put sim in wrong side up! (so obvious!!, though im not alone! i was told) is it a must!

 

[Hadron]

No problem - it's what the forum is for. And anything I know about this stuff I learned from others.

If you had wiped cache/dalvik it would not have returned you to a previous ROM. When you install one ROM you overwrite the previous one. Though 4EXT can make a backup of a ROM that you can then restore using 4EXT (not a bad plan when trying a different ROM).

"cache" is temporary files stored by the system, so while wiping that occasionally fixes system prroblems (if there is something corrupt in there) it's not common that that works (usually only if you changed ROMs, since such files are more commonly incompatible in that case). Wiping cache is harmless though, so you can always try it if there's an issue, all it costs is a few minutes.

"Dalvik" is harder to explain. Dalvik is the "runtime environment" for Android apps in older Android versions (it was replaced by something called "ART" a number of years ago). So when an android app is installed, part of that installation is the creation of "dalvik files" from the app installer package (apk) that is downloaded from the Play Store - basically compiling and building the apps. Wiping dalvik erases these files, which sounds like it will break all of your apps, but what actually happens is that when you reboot the phone it checks that the files are there and rebuilds them for any apps where they are missing. The reason you might want to do this is when installing a new ROM, possibly based on a different version of Android, it's cleaner and safer to redo this bit of the app installation. Remember that a large part of the purpose of a custom recovery is for installing custom ROMs, so a lot of the functions are designed to help with that.

But the long and short if it is that if you'd wiped cache/dalvik almost certainly all that you'd see is that the phone would take longer to boot up, and you'd have to watch it saying things like "android is optimising" or "optimising app X out of Y" for several minutes (depending on how many apps you'd added).

Volume keys: hard to say. They have moving parts, they are pressed a lot, they can get dirt in the contacts, or something can break inside. You can't always see anything obvious. i've never suffered anything worse than a slightly stuck key which had to be worked loose, but my daughter once had the "volume down" key jam permanently on (which resulted in the phone only booting into fastboot mode and then being unable to use the menu - I thought of this when you described your problem, but it's not the same as you'd not be able to boot into android at all if that was going on).

 

[jij]

wow wow wow wow wow!

iv been living in the dark ages!

it will take some getting used to, but aprt from vol buttons, id say it almost working out of the box new.

i saw internal mem 132mb 16mb free & thats before any thing downloaded, how can u, we, i sort that? the speaker on the phone sounds better, unless im just biased. do you think the vol buttons could be cleared cleaned? u enlarge & it seems to actually noticeably do so

 

[Hadron]

Did you do the stuff about partitioning the card and that other installation that was in the instructions after the ROM install? That is to help with internal storage: the second partition on the card acts as overflow space for app storage. This is something you can only do with root/custom ROM.

Otherwise you can go into Settings > Apps, select an app and choose "move to SD" if the option is there. But that only moves part of the app, and only works for apps you install yourself, so won't get you very far if you are already down to 16MB (I'm a little surprised if there's no more than that without you installing anything, but maybe the ROM is really designed to work with a partitioned card).

 

[jij]

is it easy to unlock a htc a8181, if Lockd to a given service provider? i can't rem, if phone was unlocked, but orange my 1st service provider? i'm thinking, if it was orange locked, it wud have had logo on back? mine nvr!
main hand a prob, phone is so handy 2 use with other hand

 

[Hadron]

If it works at all with a 3 SIM it has already been unlocked from Orange, or was never locked in the first place. The SIM unlock is completely unrelated to the locking/unlocking of the bootloader.

If you do need to SIM unlock is then the tool we always recommended was this one. It looks like the Windows version of it is still available. I don't know whether it works with custom ROMs or needs a HTC ROM, but it doesn't say that it needs anything specific so it's probably OK (this is XDA, so that's not the sort of detail you'd overlook). I never used it myself because I'm one of those smug gits who never buys network-locked phones - I learned a long time ago that Carphone Warehouse sells unlocked phones even if you buy them on a contract or as a network upgrade, so even if you can't afford to just pay the full price upfront there's no need to put up with SIM locking or the service provider messing with the phone software.

 

[jij]

hi hadron, im so chuffed, with the phone, its really come new.

if i got new vol button(s) put in, would it solve vol issue ( though they feel as when new ) or is it more tech than just a button switch??

since I only need 4 calls, txts & music if i fancy a listen - would it hurt to get a 16 or 32g sd? it keeps saying int mem low, but think I might wait til new sd!

 

[jij]

is it: tools, partition sd card ->, back key from there are 1876mb of space on your sd-card warning: use this feature to leave FAT32
intact AT YOUR OWN RISK!
It's proven to work, but I'm
NOT responsible if you lose your data!, pressing no - save my fat32 partition gives this will leave you with 1877 mb of space available for partitioning, tick box or back key, leading to list 128... to 4096 - stuck! i guess the larger he sd-card size, the higher number choice for the 1st partition size?

 

[Hadron]

I've not used the 4EXT partitioning tool lately - actually I'm not sure I ever used it, since I always had access to GParted (the GNU Partition Editor, as used by Linux implementations). I expect you are right that it suggests partition sizes based on the size of the card. But I don't think we ever used huge partitions with the Desire because let's face it 1GB is more than 6x the full internal storage of the phone, and back then apps were smaller so nobody ever managed to use much more than that.

So your FAT32 partition is the normal SD card, the second partition is for app storage. So setting the second one to 1-2GB should be enough. However if you are thinking of getting a larger card it might be worth doing that first. But if you partition a smaller card and then want to transfer to a bigger one, the trick is:

* make a backup using 4EXT, which should back up the second partition. Note that you must have enough space on the FAT32 partition to make the backup, so if there's little free space there this may be a problem.

* put the new card in and partition it.

* Copy the backup from the old card to the new one

* Put the new card in then use 4EXT to restore the backup.

That should work - it's been a long time since I had to think about this procedure!

 

[jij]

hi hadron, a 32gb 'bigbuild' ultra fast ( it says ) sd card £10

good price?
how much partition size - to hopefully get rid of mem too low?

 

[Hadron]

Unless you are using a ROM which puts some of the ROM in the partition (which you aren't currently, or you'd not be able to install the ROM) I doubt there's much point in > 2 GB partition. The mods we used back 8-10 years ago didn't move absolutely everything to the partition, so apps still used some internal space for their data, and hence you'd run out there before you filled a 2GB partition with apps. Of course there are mods that move the app's private data to the partition too, in which case you might use more, but I don't recall anyone ever using anything much bigger with the Desire. I'd certainly not bother with > 4 GB.

The price for a 32GB card seems reasonable to me, though it's a long time since I looked at cards that small (but there's a minimum price for a card, because at some point the cost is dominated by storage and handling rather than the card itself). I know the Desire will handle a 32GB card because that's what I used (a 32GB Sandisk that's currently in my tablet).

The standard warning with SD cards is to be careful, because a lot of cards you find on the web are "fakes", small cards reprogrammed to pretend they are larger and sold for a higher price (eBay is notorious for these things, and I've seen people buy fakes from Alibaba too, but I've also seen them listed in Amazon Marketplace). I'd be a little surprised if anyone bothered faking a 32GB card in 2020 - these days they are more likely to hack a 32GB card and sell it as a fake 256GB - but it's worth being a little careful anyway. If you can spare a little time you can always check any card you buy using a little app called h2testw, which fills a card with a pattern of data and reads it back: if the real card is smaller than it's supposed to be the writing will appear ok but most of the data will be missing when it comes to read back. That's what happens to people who buy fake cards, the card fills up but the phone doesn't know because it thinks the card is bigger than it really is, so it carrys on writing and overwrites the data that are already on it. I've no idea what happens when someone tries to partition a fake card: they weren't so common when we were doing this, so I never heard of anyone get into that situation.

 

[jij]

if new vol button was installd, would it sort prob issue?

 

[Hadron]

It depends what the problem with the volume button is. It might be as simple as some dirt in a contact, it might be a broken part (which may be harder to find now than when the phone was newer). But I'm fairly sure the non-working volume keys are a hardware problem from what you've said.

Of course you can probably find apps that will let you alter the volume without the keys, so apart from the bootloader menu you can probably work around it if you can't fix it.

 

[jij]

hi, in the hope some of your phone know how might rub off, iv ordered a 32gb SanDisk. when disk in, do i use command prompt to set up partition or will it be ok to power g7 up, then do reboot recovery & partition? 1gb or > ??

 

[Hadron]

You should be able to partition it using 4EXT recovery

You may as well give it a couple of GB in the second partition. As I say, I doubt you'll be able to use more than 4GB (but my sense here is based on apps from when this was a current phone, which were much smaller)

 

[jij]

hi hadron, if you type in query, the following

'Using 4EXT to partition SD card - Help, please!'

i believe it's my question, how do you save what's on the sd to pc, in order to bring it back when done? its really like a new phone & since 3network told me 3g wont go anywhere just yet, im happy to keep - managesd to get htc new shell ( current has few scratches) so will look new bar size - yippy.

if card brand new, do i just do the partition 2gb?, it mentions size of 1st partition not 2nd first???? hate to bridge it up!

 

[jij]

ps how easy? is it to take the phone apart, to transplant old parts into new body? would you advise it with a bad main hand??