[HTC One E8] lrbarrios:
I have an HTC One E8... I know, it's ancient... But... It's been a good phone until this past year when it really started dragging. Takes forever to do anything. A year ago, the main camera (is that the front or back camera) stopped working (phone doesn't even recognize that it's there -- flash doesn't work either with a flashlight app). Before that, phone dialing using my Bluetooth earpiece stopped working. Maybe related, but the phone doesn't work as a phone (holding it to your ear). If I'm not using the Bluetooth earpiece, it will only work on Speaker-phone mode (voice command apps such as Google Assistant and song recognition apps like Sound Hound don't 'hear' anything). Lastly, the Bluetooth has been disconnecting for no apparent reason. My earpiece will say 'Phone 1 disconnected', but when I look at the Bluetooth icon on the phone, it still thinks it's connected. Tapping the icon to turn off Bluetooth and then tapping again 'fixes' the problem and it connects again. It's just annoying when it does this in the middle of a conversation (and because, when it happens, the other party doesn't hear me yelling at them to wait because my Bluetooth disconnected because the phone doesn't know that anything is wrong). I had read ones that the Bluetooth drivers for this phone were sketchy. It's strange, though, this this problem has really gotten worse over the past couple of months without me making any changes to the phone. Lastly, the battery has really gone downhill. The phone will unexpectedly shut off around 30% battery. (I even tried the HTC battery recalibration technique -- no joy.) I chalked all of this up (except for the battery issue) to software. I thought maybe a good ol' factory reset (wipe) would fix the issues. For years (literally) it's been nagging me about a system update (Android 6.0). I never did it because the phone was already running slow and it's always screaming about being out of storage space. It hovers around 500MB free most of the time. I don't have that much installed on it. Any apps that will allow it, have been moved to the SD card.

That's the back-story to give you some insight as to what's going on with the phone. I included all of that 'other' stuff (camera and voice dialing issues) in case someone has seen them before and can offer any suggestions there.

So here's where I'm at. I decided to try to do a factory reset to 'refresh' the OS (remove all the patches and updates) and start over. Afterwards, I wanted to run Link2SD with a 64GB SD card so I wouldn't have the space limitations that I'm experiencing now after all of the apps have updated. The other night, after backing up the internal memory and the SD card, I started the process. (BTW, I have another SD card that I'm going to use that I've already partitioned per the Link2SD instructions.) After much trial and error, dead download links, incompatible versions of adb.exe and fastboot.exe I finally managed to get TWRP recovery installed. Then there was the issue of getting a working SuperSU installed. Finally did that. The phone booted and started walking me through the process of setting up my Google account. Everything seemed to go well. The phone was just as speedy as the day I got it. I was even able to restore my 15000 text messages and it was still zippy. It was wonderful! Unfortunately, the camera still doesn't work. Seems like voice dialing isn't working at the moment either. The Bluetooth issue seems to have gone away. Since the camera still isn't working, it looks like I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and get a new phone. This one will just become a 'toy' or a temporary backup phone in the event something tragic happens to the new phone. I'll just use this one on Wi-Fi only to check the weather and maybe play some games (which I had pretty much stopped doing because it was so slow and always out of storage). I would also use it as my portable media device for listening to downloaded podcasts and music while I'm running or riding my bike. It could also (maybe without mobile data) track my runs and rides, etc. As long as it doesn't get slow like it was before, I think it'll do just fine in its re-purposed life. (It was so slow I could barely play music from Google Music and have Google Fit tracking my run at the same time. It would take forever to switch screens!)

Ah, what's this?! Oh, there's that software update again. I guess I'll go ahead and do it before I start setting up a bunch of apps and tweaking the phone to my preferences. Nope! It downloads the OTA update into the Downloads folder and starts the process, but when it reboots, it reboots in Recovery mode into TWRP. I'm now finding that you can't easily do an OTA update after you've rooted your phone and put a custom recovery on it. I've seen lengthy instructions on how to put get a stock recovery.img out of the OTA zip file in the Downloads folder. I've moved it to my PC and pulled the firmware.zip file out. When I try to open the firmware.zip file to get to the recovery.img file, Windows is saying it's corrupted. I also see something about using an RUU.exe or RUU.zip file to restore the phone to stock. I've downloaded the correct RUU .exe file for my Sprint e8 in case I decide to go that route.

Here's my question... I know, finally! Since I don't have really anything on this phone since I did the reset and root, would it just be simpler to use the RUU method to blow it away and start over instead of trying to resolve the corrupt firmware.zip file issue and all of the other steps that follow? That's question #1. Question #2 is this... Will this RUU that I downloaded actually take the phone straight to Marshmallow before it starts walking me through setting up my Google account? If so, that's great! I'm all for the ease of that. I noticed that OTA download was about 250MB, while the RUU download is 1.5GB. Why such a difference? Is it because the RUU is the full-blown deal and not just the patches? I'm fine doing the RUU and then reinstalling and rooting the phone afterwards if that'll work. I still have all the files that I previously downloaded.

Sorry for the novel, but I wanted to be as thorough as possible to eliminate the back and forth "Did you try this?" "Did you try that?" However, if there is anything that I left out that would help with your answer/advice, please don't hesitate to ask. Thanks in advance for any guidance you can give a noob. ;)

lrbarrios