[myTouch 3G Slide Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] JWEEZY78:
My Stock 2.2.1 Process

My warranty replacement came with stock 2.2 and all of the tutorials here and elsewhere fell short. I did notice a lot of the other guides were based on "if you upgraded to 2.2"; that did not completely apply in my situation. I to am an industry professional with 14 years experience and am a stickler for detail. I had the gold card created on a SanDisk 2gb micro sd acquired from Walgreen's. I had followed all the steps in order, but the update on the first reboot never happened, it never asked and selecting the update.zip failed signature verification. I knew S-ON was set (which is the whole problem) but the guides I saw to disable it required you already be rooted (which I wasn't).

This past week I did something different. Using the official HTC MyTouch 3G Slide Froyo installer (not selecting anything just having RUU opened) I copied the folder structure (a crazy GUID looking thing) that was in my %TEMP% directory to another location. I closed out of the installer and went to that copied folder. I moved the existing "rom" file and copied the 2.1 "ESPRIMG" image there and renamed it to rom.zip. I then executed the RUU from that folder. It being an HTC official rom did allow the RUU to complete and the slide was officially downgraded to 2.1. After the reboot I verified the ROM was the older version and went ahead with what I was used to.

After that; some of my previous attempts to root were evident because I already had the "#" prompt in the adb shell. Regardless, I did repeat some of the documented steps (just in case my eyes deceived me) from the exploid method (what I used on my previous phone that was an original build). I originally flashed the CM 7.03 while the goldcard (2gb) sd was still in there. I then installed my 32GB card, then hit a nightly, then hit a few more older CM builds (had issues with sd-ext, couldn't find the original guide i used to set it up - new card as well). I did format boot, data, system, sd-ext, and the cache from the clockworkmod recovery screen before settling on CM 7.1 RC 1

If you find it necessary to create the sd-ext partition, format the fat partition in windows, format the other two in the shell. I do not recommend logging (app sync) on the first rom. Build the sd-ext first; re-rom, before doing all the account/app setup. While the phone is USB debugging mode you can use DriodExplorer to shortcut some things (especially if u have all your apks in a backup folder on your computer). I do not recommend using certain busy-box commands from the DriodExplorer terminal. The output can be out of sync at times. I have a 32gb SD and have about 29.3G on FAT, 896MB on SD-EXT (ext3 file system), and the rest on cache. After that Simple2Ext will allow for you to tell CM7 to use the SD-EXT. I do not use .android secure (the froyo apps2sd) because that causes issues when using the fat partition as disk in windows and you have something like a theme installed. Because of themes, games, and other apps I am now using 62% of the sd-ext partition. And an earlier comment I saw on the thread is right. The partition order is FAT, SD-EXT, CACHE. Where the guide is I don't recall.

Also note: If you are doing ADB commands and notice it often says the process is stale; uninstall the HTC sync (this does not affect the drivers, drivers are installed as a pre-req before HTC Sync is installed).

My only outstanding issue is the radio version might have been affected; it's not showing a version number on my info app. So I need to find a guide on verifying/upgrading the radio (one that does not involve installing the htc froyo rom).