[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] romainechester:
Hello everyone,

I decided that I'd like to finally replace my phone's rom with Cyanogenmod. This post will most likely cover the things that I have done so far and I'd appreciate if you can identify where I could have gone wrong or what I still need to do.

I first went to the site and looked through the wiki on how to install it.

I used the unrevoked method. At first I had difficulties with trying to get it to work as the software didn't seem to detect my phone. So I googled around and found out that one way to fix it was to install the HTC Sync software (thus installing the needed drivers to be able for unrevoked to identify my phone). I found this at some blog I found in the comments section of theUnlockr.

So I run unrevoked and it worked. I now have root access to my phone. Tested it on the terminal by typing su.

I downloaded the Rom Manager from the market (following the step in the cyanogenmod wiki) and updated ClockworkMod to 2.5.0.7

After a couple of tinkering I found out that there's this error when I start recovery mode.

E:Can't find MISC:
E:Can't mount CACHE:recovery/command
E:Can't find MISC:
E:Cant' mount CACHE:recovery/log
E:Can't find MISC:

I didn't pay attention to this.

So the next step for me would be to back up everything. SMS, apps, and then finally do a backup of the rom.

So back to the recovery mode. I go on and select 'backup and restore' from the recovery menu and I get this error:

SD Card space free: 664MB
backing up boot...
Error while dumping boot image!
E:Can't mount CACHE:recovery/log
E:Can't find MISC:

Ugh... So I google around for some info on this and found out a similar problem with mine. The recommended solution was to install AlphaRev on the phone, but unfortunately did some damage to the phone. The poster can only get as far as the bootloader and recovery. Has something to do with the phone being PVT4. I think the newer version of Alpharev handles that already.

Now I look around tutorials on how to install alpharev on my phone to gain S-OFF, but most of the tutorials I found recommends that I do a backup. How I could I do that if it doesn't work in the first place? :(

So then I decided to replace Clockwordmod with Amonra (lots of googling again) then I stumble upon this site where one can install Amonra in three ways: bootloader, Rom Manager, and terminal. Though not sure whether it would be applicable to my phone, I gave it a shot.

Bootloader: I downloaded the PC36IMG.zip file, placed in on the sdcard. Started on bootloader and crossed my fingers. Didn't work.

Rom Manager: I downloaded the free app. Unfortunately, the "Flash Alternative Recovery" is disabled.

terminal: typed this

flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery-RA-supersonic-v2.3.img

and just gave me a "flash_image not found"

Okay... by then I'm getting a little bit frustrated. I started this endeavor around 10am and got to this step at around 4pm. It's 8pm now as I'm typing.

Back to my problem. Now I decide to try to replace using unrevoked. I try to use the software again but now there's an error that says that unrevoked cannot get to root and that the firmware may be a new version.

TL;DR

1. successfully rooted HTC Desire using unrevoked

2. Having trouble with Clockworkmod (Can't do backups)

3. Unable replace Clockworkmod with Amonra.

I am now at wit's end. I really don't know what to do now. I wouldn't attempt to install Alpharev without doing a back up. Even more so with trying to install cyanogenmod.

Any form of help is greatly appreciated.

NOTE: This is a cross post. I posted this question at the general QA section but I was not getting any responses. Since this is a Desire-related question, I hope I won't get that much flack for posting here as well.