[Droid Incredible General] kirkers:
Biggest risks for me came AFTER success

I totally relied on Scotty's guide, and it delivered everything it promised. Nevertheless, I found my way into some very heavy going shortly thereafter.

Perhaps the story of my "near-Droid-death" experience will help others be safer. I still am not absolutely sure I know what happened. I am definitely happy to still have a properly rooted Droid Incredible (DINC) and at least have a chance of making some further mods, if I can work up the courage to risk it.

Why am I sounding like the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz? Keep reading and you may get a better idea...

It all started in the middle of the successful downgrade & re-upgrade process Scotty provides in his guide. The one thing that was disappointing about my DINC was WiFi reception. I had expected a significant positive bump up from my venerable MOTO DROID (the original), but that had not happened. If anything, the DINC was a bit behind the DROID in performance. This seemed odd, given how much users raved about the DINC’s many fine features. I did not recall reading a single criticism of WiFi, or anything else for that matter – except somewhat disappointing battery life. (My solution to that is easy: get some cheap batteries and a stand-alone charger on eBay or wherever, and keep those little wafers charged up and handy on your person!)

Then, suddenly , everything changed for the better after the downgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo happened. WiFi connectivity became very easy, and dropouts virtually disappeared even with only fair signal strength (-75 to -80 dB). I was thrilled of course, and gave all the credit to the rooting process. I fully expected to retain the WiFi up-tick when I reached our final destination of a rooted stock Gingerbread (GB) 2.3.4. Only …. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, the DINC’s WiFi sank back down to pre-root levels. Something about the two flavours of Android seemed to be causing this. It deserved extended investigation.

What I found out here at XDA and elsewhere is that GB implemented a tougher minimum value for the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) . The intention seemed to be to offer users a good WiFi experience whenever they actually managed to connect without many annoying dropouts. In practice, this made connectivity much more difficult and at times impossible, even in situations where connectivity should have been reasonably good and definitely easy to access – like on a home network, for example. I could stand right next to the router or access point, and the DINC with GB simply would not lock on to the signal. During the Froyo downgrade, the exact same hardware in precisely the same wireless environment experienced no such problems.

What I concluded from this was that Froyo was where I belonged – at least until something just as good in the WiFi department showed up amongst the custom ROMs, radios and/or kernels. So I set my sights on installing the Froyo ROM Scotty had us all use in his guide.

Only in hindsight do I realize that this ROM was not rooted, because Scotty had us re-unlock and re-root once it was installed. Noob (or simply boob!) that I was, I missed this key bit. So on I went, wiping off everything except my sdcard and internal storage, renaming the Froyo ROM to the default “PB31IMG.zip” so that HBOOT would automatically try to install it, and rebooting into HBOOT.

HBOOT gave me all sorts of warnings (“wrong image”… “not an image”), but I had read on another site (not XDA, mind you) that this sort of thing could happen, and that if HBOOT went ahead and parsed the file and offered to install it, it was okay to go ahead. So, I charged ahead… :cowboy:

What I ended up with was Froyo without root. Titanium Backup and ROM Manager confirmed that quickly enough, since they were the first two apps I installed from the Market/Play Store. Booting into the ClockWorkMod (CWM) recovery produced a red triangle and exclamation point on-screen, and a frozen device that could only be thawed with a battery pull. All the commands worth trying from a PC using ADB over a USB cable to the DINC were rejected. Now I was no longer authorized. Even the procedure to re-run device unlock via ADB OEM produced fatal errors.

I thought my brief time rooting the DINC was over, and that I would have to get used to a phone without proper Titanium backups and other amenities – assuming nothing further went wrong and the DINC would never need me to use CWM recovery for anything.. Just as I was about to give up my not-so-flash flashing career, along came the perfect website to save me. Sorry, it was not XDA – at least not this time! It was the EVOrootWiki in Europe. Lucky for me I was stuck in Froyo, because the “Incredible Froyo Downgrade Kit” and instructions I downloaded completely rescued me and my DINC. At the end of the day, I was rooted into GB 2.3.4, and this time WiFi remained at the high level found in Froyo. Why this is so remains a mystery to me, but the ROM was definitely up to date in most ways with regard to radio, kernel, HBOOT (the engineering version) and such -- although it was basically all stock HDC/Verizon. Something about it set it apart from what I had used for such a brief time after finishing Scotty’s guide.

So the lesson of this fable is that dangers continue to lie in wait for unsuspecting noobs who possess that most dangerous commodity: a little bit of knowledge. Now, if my analysis is in any way incorrect, incomplete, or otherwise misguided, I do hope Scotty or other XDA seniors will step in on this thread and explain the dos and don’ts of what is at bottom a tricky and less than stable situation.

If you have made it this far, thanks for reading through a long post! :good:

Cheers all!