[HTC Desire S] kevwag:
Help - please!!

I had been stuck without a phone for a while, so a friend gave me his Desire-S, which he had soft-bricked and subsequently given up on. With the help of n0elite's excellent guide, I had it up and running on Reaper V4.0 ROM within a few minutes.

Unfortunately, Reaper V4 is a very old version of Android (yes I know the Desire-S is a very old phone!) and is not supported by some of the apps I want to use so I set about finding a suitable upgrade ROM to flash the device with (I should probably say at this point that the phone is HBoot 2.0.0.2, S-On, and yes, I know that I have to flash boot.img with fastboot). I tried a few roms with varying amounts of success, some worked, some didn't, but I was always able to get back up and running by flashing reaper back from the SD card if it hung at the splash screen.

Now this next part is where I think it all went horribly wrong. I was getting tired and frustrated having tried various CM roms that wouldn't work, and my concentration must have slipped. I'm normally a careful reader of all the blurb when flashing ANYTHING, but on one particular ROM page, I missed what was probably a vital detail without realising. I had searched for my phone under its codename: SAGA but failed to notice that the filename I downloaded said "sagaopt" rather than just "saga". I'm guessing this is a different model variant and one that's not compatible with my phone, because after flashing, not only did the rom not work, also I now cannot mount the SDCard. to install anything else. (if I'm right about it being a different model, then the page shouldn't have been in the Desire-S forum in the first place!)

In my subsequent attempts to solve the problem, there was one recovery image I tried that could mount the card, but all it showed within the card was a single folder: TWRP. Since the card actually has several folders (but not one called TWRP) in its root, I realised that the problem is down to some kind of virtual filesystem mapping, and I think this is where I made my biggest mistake. The logic was that the mappings must be at system level, so the easiest way to get rid of them would be to format the system partition! OOPS!

Ever since then I have been stuck in a loop. There is no system on the phone, I can flash various recovery.img and boot.img, but I still can't mount the sdcard to install a zip (I have tried reformatting the card with various different filesystems as recommended by a handful of people who have had a similar problem, but it didn't work). Fastboot Sideload doesn't work either (with appropriate recovery - I'm using PhilZ Touch Recovery (CWMod based I think), first producing error: ABD server didn't ACK, it then restarts the Daemon and tries again, Now the error is "Error: device not found"

. In recovery, listing the partitions shows SDCARD as f/s:FAT32 , Size: 'null', Free 0B. Null gets another mention if I type adb root at the command prompt, it returns the error "error: device '(null)' not found" which I'm sure is directly linked to the "null" size of the SDCard..

I think my best / only hope now, is to use a system.img file with fastboot flashall, but I don't seem to be able to find one.

I now know I could have created one by backing up the system while there still was a system to backup, but unfortunately it's a little late for that!

Have I completely destroyed this thing now or is there anything I can do?