[T-Mobile Sidekick 4G] ratchetdude101:
Well, let me start from the beginning. I am sorta of new to the whole android modification arena, and the sidekick 4g is my first android phone, but I have learned a lot since june and so it's not like I don't know most of my way around the low level software hacking and such. I was there when clockworkmod was released, and I was there when smooth maximus was first published, I know what is going on, and what is in recent sidekick 4g hacking news. That aside, I rooted my phone around june 10th ish, and it was fine. Then I installed clockworkmo, and with a few forum reading I managed to fix all the litte mistakes I made and everything was fine again. Then I decided to flash smooth maximus gingerclone v1 after become more comforable with the whole idea(skipped over the first couple of smooth maximus ROMs). And part of tmobile android is having an app called tmobile contacts backup. EXTREMELY helpful for a person like me, I hate having to put contacts back in, and syncing from gmail didn't solve my problems either, it just wasn't the same :(. So I could freely download this app from the market wenever I pleased, with no trouble. Getting it back on my phone after flashing gingerclone v1 was no hassle. Then a few days ago gingerclone v2 came out. I followed the same procedures as before, but fell into a bit of trouble when flashing gingerclone v2, ad gingerclone v1 would keep booting up anyway. But I eventually got it working by just kept following instructions again and again. And before I flashed, I backed up a few apps with titanium(great app)(and made a NANDroid backup of course) but I didn't back up tmobile contacts backup because I thought I could just download it from the market(forshadowing). So I got gingerclone v2, and I tried downloading tmobile contacts backup and it was gone from the market. Just plain disappeared. And I looked on other websites, some no link, some saying it had been removed. Then I got the the online market on my computer, and google said that the app was not compatible with my sidekick 4g, not when it had stock ROM, or when it had custom ROM. I was confused. So I did what the poster of smooth maximus said to do if we wanted to keep our apps when we flashed over. In recovery, go to backup\restore>advanced restore> restore data. And all my apps were there(not functioning, but a simple reinstall would fix the problem. But I couldn't reinstall tmobile contacts backup because I couldn't find it anywhere to download. So I decided to restore my entire nandroid backup and I had gingerclone v1 again, but a lott more app were gone(including market, etc.) And I was used to this happening(didn't know if that was a good thing though) and so I couldn't download titanium backup to back up tmobile contacts backup and try gingerclone v2 again. So I decided to ODIN to stock ROM. Seemed easy enough, I had already lost everything, why not try it?(forshadowing). I followed ayoteddy's guide exactly step by step, and when I did ODIN, it got to the last section, and then said FAILED(on the computer) in the box as it turned red. I tried it again and it wouldn't do anything so I figured all I could do it just try and boot up the phone. I did, and it showed the sidekick bootloader but with the android logo flickering along with it. It booted and did all the female robot voices(patitioning...estimated time: 2 minutes, etc.) And then it booted just fine. It really started to mess up this morning, freezing rampantly and going back to a black screen with the android logo and light shining across it(like the windows 7 loading bar) and about an hour later all of a sudden it stopped messing up, everything was quick and jumpy and fast(for a stock rom, it was as fast as smooth maximus gingerclone, and I got a quadrant score of around 1500!, weird I thought so) I double checked to make sure it was stock rom and it was. So I decided to try to root it, and superoneclick rooted it, and always got stuck at putting su in system\xbin, it never got past that part. So I had to leave it at that. I want to ODIN again and try to make it work, but I have no way of getting to "download" mode and doing it. Not through the software, and I tried the volume +, trackball, power combo and it has never worked(trust me, I've tried). So I was hoping maybe you guys can tell me I'm doing something wrong, I'd really like to hear that right now. How do I get to "download" mode without rooting? Maybe take me step by step to do it the hardware way. I might even just root it through adb and make sure everything goes right? Any suggestions would be nice. Thanks in advance everyone for your help!