[Motorola Photon 4G] cool old lady:
I am so, so exhausted from searching thread after thread and on Google, so I beg no one to bark at me if I missed finding my answer. I've read the Compendium several times and thanked Lokifish Marz - actually thanked him back during the summer when I first rooted my MoPho. And I have thanked several people for the support my moto campaign, which I've followed closely.

So, what I've done and what it's doing:

- Rooted it successfully this summer using photon torpedo and Lokifish Marz's help (first time rooting at all). I didn't fool with trying to unlock / flash / mod anything because I knew I wasn't ready yet. Shortly thereafter....

- Updated to 2.3.5 before we knew what a death sentence that was. Afterward, decided once again to just wait it out and see what happened with development, and keep learning what I could (and I'm a 38 year old woman with a Bachelor's in English, so we're talking slow learning curve here).

- Used it normally until my contract with Spint expired in November, dropped them and got a Galaxy S2 on T-Mobile prepaid. Decided "I'll just turn my Photon into a fancy little tablet for my boys to game on.."..

- So I pulled the Sprint sim, and did a soft, then hard, factory reset via Android Recovery.

- Boots up fine and I skip the google setup, I get to "Connection Failed..in order to complete setup you need a data connection." No problem, I hit "Setup a Wi-Fi connection" and select my network. Click in the password field...no keyboard pops up. Hold down in the field and "select Input method pops up", click it...it says "No keyboard" . So I clicked "skip for now" and get

Sorry! The application Accounts (process com.motorola.setup) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again." Have to click Force close.​

...the it goes back to the "setup a wi-fi connection dialog".​

- Retried above several times, pulling battery and whatnot, tried another hard reset, still...."no keyboard." So after MUCH searching, I installed Moto drivers on my new laptop, installed RSD Lite, downloaded SBF: 1FF-sunfire-user-2.3.4-4.5.1A-1_SUN-154_5-CM-release-keys-signed-Sprint-US and unpacked it. In RSD Lite I browse to the file, select it - okay, file properties are there.

- Using instructions from here, I do it all right and get stuck at

RSD​

Starting RSD Protocol Support​

I plug in the usb and...nothing happens. And man I waited a loooooong time. But the phone never does anything else and RSD Lite never shows any device properties and nothing ever happens when I click Start. Again, I tried this step several more times, pulling battery, with and without the Sprint sim, etc...and nothing. So I'm stuck here.

Last important note:

While booted up and stuck at the "no keyboard" roadblock, I can connect the usb, select "usb mass storage" and my laptop DOES find the Photon and open up the drive. I see all these folders/files:

I ALSO tried copying the sbf file onto the mnt/sdcard folder, then rebooting to Android Recovery and "install update from sdcard"..but the directory looks empty on the phone.

So I can't reflash the stock sbf file....and I'm wondering if that's even necessary considering I can get as far as I do during setup. Seems the simplest thing would be to sideload a keyboard apk so I could proceed through setup...but I see no way to do that within my current restraints.

What to do, what to do? I thank you most kindly in advance if you can assist me. I apologize for the long-winded post but I wanted to provide as much info as may be necessary for an assist.