[AT&T HTC One (M8)] StratcatNC:
Thanks for your response, I appreciate it. I have indeed tried the RUU that way, it will either say "update failed" or it will attempt the update and the phone reboots and I am back to this weird saved state. I had some advice from graffixnyc to try booting from a recovery (non-flased) which I have all cause the phone to reboot and lose any changes. I have also tried the RUU.EXE for the Dev Edition, GPE Edition, Stock and all of them start to run and then reboot and lose connection.

Something on the phone has somehow saved a state that it returns to on every reboot. So you can even rm -rf the entire /system from an adb shell su'd as root. It will delete everything, and when you reboot the phone, its all right back to the same state. You can add, modify, delete, anything on the device you want, but as soon as it reboots it will lose it.

The reboot is what is killing me on every front. The only thing that I found that was odd is yesterday I tried running the RUU.exe for the dev edition and running two at the same time. What happened is the first one detected my firmware as 2.12 which is incorrect, the second one that ran (while the first one was still running) reported the firmware as 1.16 (correct). However while that "seemed" to get farther, the phone rebooted, and...you guessed it... all changes were lost.

So what on earth would allow the device to have this "saved "state" that it returns to? If I delete files via rm -rf then I would expect I am either not actually interacting with the filesystem or it is overwriting it with a saved img from somewhere? Confused as hell by this.

*edit* I even tried DD every partition I could from adb shell and nothing took from a known good stock backup. Nothing took.

Here is the output from trying to run the fastboot commands that graffixnyc had suggested to me.

System> About Phone

--Model Number: HTC ONE_M8

--Android Version: 4.4.4

--Baseband Version: 1.14.21331931.LA02_2G_20.30A.4145.01L

--Kernel Version: 3.4.0-gb1b6fb1 | android@gpe #1v| Mon Jul 16 18:49:22 CST 2014

--Build Number: KTU84P.H1 release keys

Phone:

adb

$ adb devices

List of devices attached

HT43KWM01872	device

$ adb reboot bootloader

*** Unlocked ***

M8_UL_CA PVT SHIP S-OFF

CID-GOOGL001

HBOOT-3.18.0.0000

RADIO-1.14.21331931.LA02_2G

OpenDSP-v32.2.2-00542-M8974.0213

OS-1.16.1700.16

eMMC-boot 2048

Mar 21 2014, 22:29:15.0

$ fastboot devices

HT43KWM01872	fastboot

$ fastboot boot 1.16.1700.16.recoverygpe.img

creating boot image...

creating boot image - 25167872 bytes

downloading 'boot.img'...

OKAY [ 1.607s]

booting...

OKAY [ 0.002s]

finished. total time: 1.608s

Phone Flashed Black Screen then back to bootloader:fastboot usb

$ fastboot boot stock\ recovery\ 1.12.1540.17\ recovery.img

creating boot image...

creating boot image - 25167872 bytes

downloading 'boot.img'...

OKAY [ 1.599s]

booting...

OKAY [ 0.002s]

finished. total time: 1.600s

Phone Flashed Black Screen then back to bootloader:fastboot usb

$ fastboot boot stock\ recovery\ 1.22.980.1\ recovery.img

creating boot image...

creating boot image - 25167872 bytes

downloading 'boot.img'...

OKAY [ 1.592s]

booting...

OKAY [ 0.002s]

finished. total time: 1.594s

Phone Flashed Black Screen then back to bootloader:fastboot usb

$ fastboot boot 3.11.1700.5.recovery.img

creating boot image...

creating boot image - 13539328 bytes

downloading 'boot.img'...

OKAY [ 1.249s]

booting...

OKAY [ 0.002s]

finished. total time: 1.250s

$ fastboot oem writecid 11111111

...

(bootloader) Start Verify: 0

(bootloader) Input CID is super CID

(bootloader) Start Verify: 0

OKAY [ 0.025s]

finished. total time: 0.025s

$ fastboot oem readcid

...

(bootloader) cid: 11111111

OKAY [ 0.010s]

finished. total time: 0.010s

Tried fastboot booting from the 4 recovery again with supercid, but after each phone screen flash to black the cid was reset to GOOGL001

Tried booting to RUU mode and repeating the commands above, with same result.