[G1 General] rocky2005:
Okay I have been on this forum for a few months now and I still consider my self a noob it seems as though that magical search feature that everyone demands us noobs use is not too noob friendly and to prove this I documented my frustration when trying to get this nandroid thingy to work.

Supposed noob thread: http://xdaforums.com/showpost.php?p=3816278&postcount=3

EDIT: I am 99.9% sure this will work with a PVT board. I am not sure about DVT BUT if you are willing to risk bricking your G1 to find out, that would be great Reboot in fastboot and make sure it says "DREA100 PVT"

First of all what the hell is a PVT board? And what the hell is fastboot??? UHh wait I have to do another search on this stupid PVT board and this stupid fastboot. Searching…..

Searched for fastboot here is what came up:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=000825...boot+&sa=Search&cof=FORID:0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

After clicking several search results there is not one single post that defines exactly what fastboot is or specifically what it does.

Searching for PVT Board……

And the results were: http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&...G=Search&cx=000825531964825142534:cqr2sjirilw

Not one single related post that clearly states what a PVT Board really is. Okay that’s out the window, maybe I can figure it out by reading how people are talking about it. Fun stuff. Unable to decypther what the hell people are talking about, NEXT search!

Okay now I want to find out what the hell a nandroid backup is.

Searching Nandroid…

Wow First success!! First result takes me to this post: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=459830

Oh no not again more words to search!!

Okay I see two strange words I do not know Busybox (wtf?) and adbd.

Searching Busybox….

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=000825...sybox&sa=Search&cof=FORID:0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Results are not clear, just links me to some posts that have some RC30 release (is the RC30 busybox? That is still not clear. Other results refer to it as some kind of back up tool, I thought the nandroid was a backup tool? SO that goes out the door Next search adbd….

Searching adbd..... Nothing that directly defines what exactly adbd is, all I got was people talking about it but never directly referencing exactly what it is ( ex: “need some questions answered about adbd and debuggerd Dream android development.” Or “restarting adbd as root”) Maybe it stands for a dumb big day? God knows.

Okay back to the original Nandroid post because its really important that a noob does a back up just incase right?………

I decided to go ahead and proceed without knowing what those two words were (of course I’ll get yelled at by everyone for not searching if I make a post asking what they meant so no point in posting).

Oh this is probably my favorite part of the post!!!

LOL the easy part!!!-* How to use this (the easy part)

And below it is this sentence:

“Just boot your phone in recovery mode with the correct recovery.img (one that has adb shell as root + busybox installed with symlinks to tar, md5sum etc) and connect it to your pc/laptop/server. Then run the nandroid.sh script. If something is wrong or missing, it will tell you. “

So lets break down this sentince (as a noob) line by line.

1st line: Just boot your phone in recovery mode with the correct recovery.img

Recovery mode? I think that is the pressing of the HOME+END key or is it the END+CAM keys? Which do you mean????? My guess is the HOME+END.

2nd line: (one that has adb shell as root + busybox installed with symlinks to tar, md5sum etc) WOA dude what planet you on?!! This entire line makes no freakin sense to me. And I do not think searching will help us there. “one that has adb shell as root” WTF is the one that has adb shell???? And wtf is adb??? And symlinks to tar? Is that encrypted language for his secret lover to find him? Geez how is anyone supposed to learn by searching stuff like this?? Okay at this point im just about to give up on this whole damn back up and just live without it, next line….

3rd line: Then run the nandroid.sh script. If something is wrong or missing, it will tell you.

Umm HOW? How do I run the nandroid.sh script and on WHAT operating system? Mac, Windows, Linux??? The only thing wrong or missing is proper Instructions and good English course!!!

If you are going to post a tutorial please don’t assume that everyone knows what your talking about and skip over steps that you think are elementary when in-fact you will discover that sometimes not everyone knows what you are talking about.

BTW I found this tutorial here (where supposedly 95% of my questions are answered….. umm sure): http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=519523

Isnt this article supposedly posted to be in the pre-reading material before a noob posts questions?

This is not the only article that I found not to be noob friendly, in-fact I found very little articles that were noob friendly, here is yet another thread that I found to be rediculy confusing: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=512453

When I first went to this thread (before knowing what WIPE meant) I was like WTF is this guy crazy. Then he goes on to talk about some crazy loop (which he does not state how or where you get this mysterious loop) then he goes and pasts some code that god knows where the hell your supposed to paste it, on the phone in the command prompt or is it only in the mac????

There are soo many more threads like the ones above. It is no wonder why noobs post the same questions over and over again, its because people assume that everyone else knows what their talking about and skip what they think are useless 2 or 3 steps, well I got news for you buddy, those silly 2 or 3 steps are probably the most important steps to beginner. I am still fairly new to this forum and still am having trouble figuring out what people are talking about. I just wish that there were some kind of rules or guidelines when writing instructions or how-to guides. The ONLY guide on this entire forum that I found to be clearly written and total noob proof is this thread here:http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=502010 Everyone should take a few pointers from this person that wrote that thread, although he never stated the purpose of it at the start but that’s minor.

Sorry if I offended anyone but this is the ugly truth for us noobs, it really is hard when your first starting out and some one bashes you for asking a question that’s been asked before or the noob didn’t search. Well the search feature is not exactly that great and you almost always do not find the answer to that one noob question. And yes I am very grateful for all these great hacks and I am just posting this just out of frustration from having to constantly search and after having spent hours searching and searching. I am almost certain that I am not the only noob with this problem.

My next journey is Themes my G1 phone (God help me).

Thanks,

Abe