[T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide] wjcarpenter:
Maybe it's due to the Alan Turing centennial stuff, but last night I witnessed some kind of Android phone religious miracle or something. ;) Without (much) warning, my formerly dead phone sprang back to life!

CAUTION: This is a tale of uninformed adventure. If you try the same stuff, instead of the miracle of life, you might witness the miracle of smoke or other calamites.

So, there is hope. I wish I could tell you precisely how I did it, but I was just fooling around with this boat anchor, trying various desperate measures, when it suddenly greeted me with an hboot screen. In case others are in a similar "no harm in trying" state, here is the sort of stuff I was fiddling with last night.

I've tried the HTC Unbricking Project for MT4GS literally dozens separate times: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1627881 I've tried lots of variations of ways of getting the phone to be recognized (battery in, battery out; go fast, wait a while; push various buttons, push no buttons; full moon, new moon; ...). All dismal failures, so I've concluded -- rightly or wrongly -- that I don't have the kind of bricking that that stuff can cure.

Just on a whim, I thought there would probably be something I could do if I got the phone into Qualcomm download mode. That goes by various names (which is very confusing), but the phone gets recognized over USB as "QHSUSB_DLOAD". You can read a bit about that here: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1464711 I had tried this in the past without success (don't remember what techniques I tried), but I thought I would give the "wire trick" a shot. (On reflection, it might be just a mis-remembering on my part thinking that the wire trick would get me into download mode.)

You can read about the "wire trick" here: http://unlimited.io/ I only did the physical part of the wire trick, the timed shorting of the contact. I didn't run any of the software mentioned on that site. (The reason is simple: I wasn't really sure what I was trying to do. I was just trying to get the danged phone to come to life somehow. In fact, last night, I didn't even go to that site. I just remembered how to do the wire trick from reading about it some time ago. I figured that if I got any interesting result, I would study up at that point.)

Well, lo and behold, when I did the wire trick (the timing is tricky, for sure), my Windows PC made that noise like it had noticed a new USB thing. Huh? What? Totally unexpected (by me). Sure enough, Windows device manager showed it with the messed-up-device icon, and properties showed the magical QHUSB_DLOAD.

(At that point, I took a little side excursion and did the same thing with a Linux PC. I could see the phone recognized in dmesg, but no new storage devices showed up, and nothing in dmesg would match the strings that the HTC Unbricking Project script is looking for. So, I went back to Windows. I'm skipping over the frustrating part where I would sometimes go 10-15 minutes without doing the wire trick correctly.)

What Windows wanted was drivers, and it didn't know how to find them. I found and tried these: http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=14386994&postcount=14 (It's really sort of taking a chance installing random stuff on my PC, but you know ... adventure!) After I installed the drivers, Windows recognized my phone as a working Qualcomm something-or-other (failed to make a note of it). It also showed up as a pseudo-serial device on port COM19:.

I was getting pretty excited and started researching the many zillions of threads about what you can do once you have access to a phone in the Qualcomm download mode. Unfortunately, it turns out you can't do much unless you have some secret mumbo jumbo that is likely only had by the hardware vendors. I trolled non-stop through the waters of "maybe someone found some magical binary that does ... something", but no joy. As far as I can tell, there is no known way for us outsiders to do anything productive through this interface on MT4GS or most other HTC phones. Most advice is that if this is all you can get, your next step is JTAG.

Along the way, though, I saw many mentions of a program called QPST (Qualcomm Product Support Tool). If you search around, you can find copies of this tool, though the most recent I found was from 4-5 years ago and runs on Windows. (I didn't look very hard because I wasn't too sure what it did, and I figured I'd look harder for a newer copy if it seemed promising.) With only a little fooling around, I got the tool to recognize my phone on COM19:. There are lots of mysterious subcommands to try. However, pretty much everything I tried failed with a message to the effect that whatever-it-was wouldn't work while the phone was in "download mode". The tool comes with some hex files that might be suitable for downloading to a phone, but nothing for MT4GS (not surprising considering the age of the software). Subcommands included a couple of things with names like "reset device" and "shutdown port". I tried them; they said no-go.

When I was done with all that fooling around, I unplugged the USB from the phone, popped a battery in, and ... as I had done maybe 50-60 times since the Great Calamity ... I tried to bring up hboot. I wasn't expecting it to work, but it did! I quickly put an HTC-signed image on my SD card and popped it in. hboot recognized it and went to work on it. (I was sweating a little bit since I had no idea how much juice was in the battery. I was careless because I didn't expect anything useful to be happening.)

So, I hope someone has enjoyed this tale of adventure. I don't know if any of the assorted things I did actually led to the hboot deciding to show itself, or if it was just random. Whatever, the phone is now re-animated, and I can get back to the original hardware problem I was trying to figure out for this phone: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1664506