[HTC Inspire 4G] JayB059:
@ Gene Poole

I had a hard time with his English too, but I understand exactly what he is saying because I did the same thing. I will try to re-explain it and hopefully someone can help us out.

In a nutshell, it sounds like we both flashed an Engineering HBoot starting with a stock US ATT Inspire 4G that came with Gingerbread. Specifically, what I did was I followed a guide on Cyanogenmod's wiki for the Inspire 4G which gave direction to downgrade to Froyo, root, and setup to use eng hboot. This apparently was a huge mistake. After the downgrade, when rebooting or powering on the phone, nothing would happen for a long time (black screen for 5 - 10 minutes, i.e. phone was off), then, screen would turn on with white background and HTC logo and phone would vibrate non-stop for several minutes, and eventually, phone would turn on. After the downgrade and making it to the home screen, I copied CM7 zip on to the SD card and rebooted into recovery via adb. Same exact weird process happened with phone being off for several minutes, then vibrating, then eventually i made it to cwm recovery. After installing CM7 and rebooting, same crazy startup process and made it into CM7 home screen.

I was hoping once CM7 was installed that the crazy startup process would disappear but it didn't. I saw afterwards in a CM forum that this happened to someone else and they had asked if the wiki could be updated to point to the Ace hack kit guide to rooting the Inspire 4g (which mentions that eng hboot shouldn't be used with the phone I had as configured). I then rebooted into bootloader via adb and after crazy startup and fastboot did not work at all (fastboot devices returned nothing). Further still, no buttons work in hboot at all (Vol Up, Vol Down, Power).

At this point, I could still get into the phone, but I wanted to try to undo everything I did and start over using the Ace hack kit. I then tried to use the Ace hack kit to unroot the phone by using the ATT GB RUU. The process seemed to go pretty far, but after a reboot, the phone never came back, and that's where I am currently. If I start the phone, it does crazy startup but never fully boots...stays on white HTC screen forever...which means I can't use adb (to my knowledge). I was able to get to hboot by putting elastics around volume down button and waiting a very long time, but it looks like hboot is still the eng hboot because none of the buttons work and I can't use fastboot. I was hoping that as part of RUU flashing that hboot would be restored to original one. I put the RUU (PD98IMG.img) on SD card, but again I can't get to it because buttons don't work.

So, it sounds like spv4 above is in a very similar boat. I have no idea what else to try. Only thing I can think of is if it's possible to somehow modify an RUU to start automatically when getting to hboot without any user input.

If anyone has any suggestions, I am more than willing to try anything. Thanks very much.

EDIT: So, as I was typing this post earlier, I had been "sitting" in hboot the whole time. When I was done, I looked at phone and PD98IMG.zip was been applied to phone automatically! Don't know if this was common knowledge or not, but everything updated OK. When it was done, hitting the power button to reboot didn't work, but I just removed battery and when putting it back in, phone booted normally back to what looks like stock RUU. Hopefully this info helps someone else.