[Verizon Droid Incredible 2] smarkyou:
I finally decided to root/s-off/ROM last week, and after following the many excellent guides around I got to a place where I liked the features and speed of the ROM I settled on (Incredible 2 HD 4.something).

Here's a breakdown of what I passed through to downgrade/s-off/root/recovery/ROM:

Friday

Downgraded from 2.3.4/Hboot0.98. Successful.

Installed CWR, su, busybox. All well.

Boot once into stock VZW GB 2.3.3.

Grab full nandroid backup of "stock" 2.3.3 as a failsafe.

Back to CWR 5.0.2.0. Installed CM7 / gapps. All still well. I wanted Sense back, so hunted for a good candidate ROM.

Settled on Incredible 2 HD from themikmik.com

Initial flash acted like I wasn't rooted (CWR .zip install said (bad) when I selected the ZIP. md5sum is perfect, so it's not a bad copy. Battery pull later and a few full wipes, install is fine.

Saturday

Inc2HD ROM is really sluggish so I decide to nuke it from orbit and start over again.

I grab the Super Wipe script and run.

Reinstall DInc2HD ROM.

Rom is very responsive, acting much better.

Start reinstalling all my apps again.

Deal with the stupid problem of sms messages from VZW (http://www.droid-life.com/2011/06/2...age-from-vzwnmn-here-is-how-to-stop-them/]fix detailed here[/URL]).

Receive and place several calls as normal throughout the day.

Gradually reinstall apps only as I need them. Keeps down the clutter :)

Sunday

Receive and place several calls as normal throughout the day.

Gradually reinstall more apps only as I need them.

Getting to a good state with apps re-authed and reinstalled. Decide to grab another nandroid checkpoint backup.

Backup is fine, resume normal daily use.

Monday (today)

[*]Alarm goes off as intended (yay - I have 'Clock' back after being missing on my phone since 2.3.3!)

[*]Listen to some spotify paired to my car on the drive into work

[*]Colleague calls me .. and I can't hear him. I figure it's a bad connection so I call him back. Still can't hear him through the earpiece. As a quick test I switch to speakerphone, I can now hear him.

I figured this was a one-time thing, but start test calls to DInc2 from my desk.

Damn - earpiece isn't passing any audio. Speakerphone toggle gets me audio, as does plugging in my 3.5mm earphones.

I then test other apps I know I can toggle to playback through earpiece, and no dice (Google Voice, etc). All I can hear is a very very faint buzz while a call or playback should be coming from the earpiece. When I hang up, the faint buzz in the earpiece goes dead again.

Made sure bluetooth radio was off to rule out pairing to other devices (though I haven't re-paired since wiping anyway). No wifi radio on either. All alone with the mobile network radio.

Now I know I've done a lot to the phone over the weekend, but I can't find any common cause of what might have happened between the last good call I placed on Sunday evening and today (Monday). Phone sat all night charging on my nightstand. No physical damage or anything like that.

Thinking this may be a ROM or app issue, I bounce back to my known-good snapshot of the 2.3.3 stock ROM. Problem persists - crap.

To further rule out, I full wipe and install CM7.1.0.1 from scratch just to get another baseline. Still no earpiece audio - getting frustrated!

Whatever it is, it isn't exhibiting signs of being a ROM or app issue because it persists full wipes (wipe/cache clear/dalvik wipe, and another pass even with the super-wipe script).

Yes, I've checked basics like making sure In-Call Volume is not muted. I've also installed Audio Manager to make sure there's not some lurking audio volume problem. All sliders maxed before, during and after test calls.

Uninstalled any audio-related app to attempt to remove any hold on audio output. But recall here - it's following across ROMs and wipes, so this is just busy work.

Logic says then that either

I hit some rare bug?

The process of mucking around with recoveries, ROMs, and other lower-level items has flipped a bit somewhere that will persist full user-space wipes/partitions/formats.

it's faulty hardware (which I have a hard time believing, but stranger things have happened!) This would just have to be horrible timing.

Searches on here and other sites don't bring up too much for the Incredible 2 and this kind of earpiece issue. There's a passing mention of a "silent audio bug" here, but doesn't seem relevant (nor much detail given).

I've grabbed output 'c:\> adb logcat -v time -b radio > alogcat.radio.txt' while making a call and switching between earpiece (default) and speakerphone. No really good clues there. Changes in logging verbosity didn't show too much of interest. I'll pastebin it after I scrub my phone number out if anyone's interested.

So after the wall of text ... anyone have any ideas?

I'm in it to win it with this, so I'm not unrooting and warrantying this pig :) I'm due for a new phone but there's nothing I want other than to just have my DInc2 back working.

I'm off to keep searching. Wondering if there are other debug-level tools/switches via adb that'd let me poke at devices, but I'm guessing those interfaces may not be as readily exposed as I'd like.

Thanks in advance all.

tl;dr - Incredible 2 earpiece randomly stopped working, but speakerphone and headphones still output phone call audio fine. Follows across wipes/ROM installs. LOLWTFBBQ?