[Hero CDMA Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] DerekZ10:
I have an HTC Hero CDMA for Alltel. I have been on a quest to make it faster by overclocking or installing a new rom. Upon receiving the phone it would not work with MMS messages so Alltel had me flash the rom using HTC sync. The software came from here: http://software.alltel.com/software.aspx?deviceID=103&platformID=22. This updates the kernel to 2.41.556.1.

Since then I tried rooting it and had many difficulties. I tried 3 different rooting strategies before (semi?-) sucessfully running this one click root apk: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=743289. It installs Darchstars Recovery.

I have since tried flashing 4 different roms such as cyangenmod 6.1 and 7.06. ALL of them bootloop for hours but recovery always restores the phone successfully.

None of this was working so I re rooted it again (never unrooted it, possibly a problem) following this guide: http://forum.cyanogenmod.com/topic/20126-cyanogenmod-7-for-the-htc-hero-cdma-v703-5-may-2011/. I installed the Andoid SDK on my computer and successfully ran all the needed commands to root my phone. Now instead of Darchstars Recovery it has ClockWorkMod 2.5.07. I tried installing all of the roms I tried before but again to no success.

At this point I'm desperate to just overclock it at least. I read around that people were getting into the mid 700 mhz ranges and I wanted that. So instead of a new rom with a newer Android version I wanted- I flashed a new overclock kernel onto the standard Alltel rom I updated my phone with. I used Zen Kernel found here: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=750170. Upon flashing the new kernel the phone went into bootloop and exhibited the same behavior as the other roms did. I recovered and set back to normal. I tried the Zenkernal flash one more time but used StockVoltage Overclocked Kernel found on the same post. This time it worked!

With the new overclock kernel 2.62.29 I installed setcpu and overclocked. However I can only hit 672mhz with it - Not what I wanted. Also with the new kernel SuperUser permissions have to be set every time. It will not remember that I previously gave permission. Additionally RomManager 4.3.3 seemingly doesn't think my phone is rooted. It fails if I try to install a rom or new recovery through it citing that it can't get superuser permission. Even though I give it permission.

The thing I noticed that is messed up and possibly causing things to become awry is that in ClockWorkRecovery when I try to clear the Dalvik Cache I get a E:Can't Mount /Dev/block/mmcblk0p2 (file Exists) message. I'm thinking this may be causing the problems and it may have been messed up by my prior attempts to root it. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Since I installed the new updated Alltel rom 2.41.556.1. I have been reading that with Sprint the newer rom breaks the ability to root the phone using many methods. I'm starting to believe this may be the case with the newer Alltel rom as well.

From my understanding to fix my problem I need to restore everything to stock, find a way to unroot, downgrade Alltel's rom, root on the downgraded rom, flash a recovery, flash a new rom? I am unclear on how to do this and it's where I need some help.

Basically my current plan (At work can't do it now) is to:

1. Install Darchstars recovery instead of ClockWorkMods because Darchstars recovery has my first original Nandroid backup to undue everything else I've done. Clockwork and Darchstar appear not to be able to restore from one others backup Nandroid, is that correct?

2. To downgrade I was going to follow these instructions: http://tech-n-life.com/index.php/2010/01/support-sunday-how-to-un-root-your-htc-hero/. The problem I see with it is finding an original Alltel RUU as opposed to Sprints.

3. Root and install new rom.

Does anyone have suggestions or a better way to approach this in finding a way to flash a new rom and actually have it work?