[Droid Incredible Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] kirkers:
A ROMan Education

Rich Americans and British used to send their young members to make a Grand Tour of Europe and get what some mischievously called a "Roman education".

Thanks to this thread, I feel as if I have had my own web-based version of a "ROM-an education" and I am grateful to all who posted here at XDA and provided some very useful links and references that led me elsewhere as well.

I am fairly new to all this. I bought my first smartphone used last spring – an OG Droid A855, Motorola’s first. (Obviously I do not believe in living on the bleeding edge of new technology!) I knew I wanted features such as direct file control and high-end backup, so rooting was obviously a must. I found rooting the A855 painless, and I stuck as close to stock as I could get. I never had any specific problems, although the phone never had very robust WiFi. That, and the sheer bulk of the device with its physical keyboard, were the main reasons I reentered the used market a couple of weeks ago and ended up with an HTC Droid Incredible (DINC).

As before, rooting was a must. This time, I had researched the rooting situation and learned about the increased difficulties on the DINC, which had to be handled by downgrading. Thanks to XDA, I found all the guidance needed to avoid the pitfalls and get the DINC unlocked, rooted, and security turned off (S-OFF).

At this point, a funny thing happened on the way to the [XDA] forum in my “ROMan education”. I had noticed that when I downgraded to rooted stock Froyo (2.2), my WiFi strength & ease of connectivity shot through the roof. On either side of this lay Gingerbread (GB) 2.3 (first pure stock, then rooted stock), and my WiFi was comparatively awful. Since I wanted to stick close to stock, I thought the best way to go was back to rooted stock Froyo. Posts in XDA and elsewhere relating to restrictions in GB affecting RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) values seemed to support this conclusion.

Now I thought I had the ROM flashing bit figured out. All I needed to do was wipe everything except my internal storage and my sdcard, rename the Froyo ROM “PB31IMG.zip”, put the ROM on my sdcard, boot into CWM 5.0.2.0 recovery , and the HBOOT (HTC’s bootloader) would install it.

Boy, was I in for a nasty surprise! All sorts of warnings shot up on the HBOOT screen – “no image found”, then “wrong image”. I was about to quit when I noticed the vertical progress bar advancing, followed by a request to install a number of elements that looked like what I wanted (boot, system, etc.). So I agreed and went ahead. How foolish… :silly:

The result was a working phone, but recovery was DOA (red triangle + exclamation point) every time I tried to boot into it – only a battery-pull could break the ice. Every command of any importance I issued in ADB via USB to the DINC came back as “ERROR – not authorised" or similar language. I did manage to flash another copy of CWM onto the phone by changing the name to the infamous PB31IMG.zip, but I got into recovery just one more time; after that, it was back to red triangles. For a time, it looked like my days of rooting and modding the DINC were over. The DINC was no longer rooted, as Titanium Backup and ROM Manager made clear, and there seemed to be nothing I could do about it. Even the unlock procedure that had originally unlocked the phone using ADB now returned an error.

Only then did I stumble across the “Incredible Froyo Downgrade Kit” on the EVOrootWiki site. By following the instructions completely, I recovered to rooted Froyo, and then re-upgraded to a version of GB 2.3.4 offered by EVOrootWiki. That is where I am now, and yes, the WiFi weather is fine for me even past Froyo.

I am once burned, so twice shy about further modding. I have dealt with the attempted official OTA updates (deadly to rooted phones of course) by killing the update ROM and tweaking the fingerprint to keep OTA from bothering me until the next update (which likely will never come with the DINC rapidly advancing toward antique status).

Still, I decided to pose the question about which custom ROMs gave good WiFi in the DINC, and the moderator generously linked me to this thread. No one has made specific mention of WiFi quality thus far, so I am wondering if this is a non-issue (WiFi is always great), or perhaps it just was not a focus of interest for whatever reason.

If anyone cares to respond , and perhaps also give me some pointers and links to help me improve my ROM management skills (plus radios, kernels, governors and the like), I will be pleased to read what appears further along in this very useful thread.

Cheers!

Written via computer, on behalf of a recovering DINC

Android GB 2.3.4 GRJ22

Build 4.06.605.3 CL140944 release-keys

Baseband radio 2.15.10.07.07 (2011-12-27)

Kernel 2.6.35.13 -g55a06e5 htc-kernal@and18-2 #1 (2011-08-18)

HBOOT (engineering vsn) 6.02.0420

Recovery CWM 5.0.2.0 (ROM Manager Pro front end)