[HTC Excalibur] ookba:
Everything you ever needed to know about "unbricking" your Excalibur but were afraid to ask is in this guide. I've put together this guide for those of you who either intentionally or unintentionally "bricked" or think you've "bricked" your Excalibur. :eek:

It is not easy to brick an Excalibur if you actually read and follow all of the steps and guidelines before a flash. In fact, not many things can go wrong unless a USB cables disconnects during a flash, your PC crashes in the middle of a flash, or you flash a corrupt image file to your device. Statistically, most of the time people only think their Excalibur is "bricked" when actually it's not.

There are three methods you can use depending of the severity of the "bricking". The first method will unbrick 50% of all Excalibur's that have simply "locked up" and won't reboot properly. The second method will unbrick 95% of all Excalibur's that encountered flashing problems or flash failures. The third and final method, and the most involved, is a "last resort" for those who have tried method's one and two numerous times unsuccessfully.

** Please perform these steps and methods at your own risk. I am not responsible for any damage you cause your device using this guide.

If you're new to the Excalibur or SmartPhones in general, please take the time to read the WiKi and this post by Stylez for valuable info before you post or try any of these steps.

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=397583

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=537151

But, before I even get into unbricking, if your phone is in fact working right now, I highly recommend you flash HardSPL to avoid even having to follow these steps anytime in the future. The steps and info for HardSPL and JumpSPL can be found in this thread by jockyw2001:

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=329605

HardSPL basically flashes your phone with an "unlocked" security partition so all security checks are bypassed when you try to flash a cooked ROM or a ROM designed for another variation of the Excalibur such as Dopod, HTC, TMO Dash, etc. Makes life much easier when trying different ROMS or cooking and testing your own! Thanks jockyw2001!!

Ok, so onto the fun stuff... Your phone won't boot... Either it's locked up and simply stopped booting or you flashed your phone and it won't boot. What do you do??

Method 1: Assuming you didn't get "bricked" from a flash problem, the first and easiest method for "unbricking" your Excalibur is (this will erase ALL data in your Excalibur):

(This method works for 50% of supposedly "bricked" Excaliburs)

Remove your SIM and SD card

Remove and reinsert your battery

While holding the two softkeys with your thumbs, press the power button

Continue holding the softkeys until a black screen appears saying "This operation will delete all your..."

Press "'send"' to restore to hard reset your phone

Let the phone cold boot and restore

That didn't work!! :confused:. This next method will reflash your phone to the factory ROM.

Method 2: Second way to the path of unbricking is:

(This method will unbrick 95% of all Excaliburs)

Get a hold of your Shipped ROM. You can find these ROMS either in Dopod's site, HTC's site (with a valid serial #), TMO's site (http://www.t-mobile.com/wmupgrade/ with a valid IMEI), or right here at XDA at this post (http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=381726)

Download one of these factory ROMS and unpack it. **Remember, if your phone is a TMO Dash, you MUST use a TMO Dash ROM. If your phone is HTC Branded, you MUST use an HTC ROM, etc., etc., etc...

Remove the SD card if one is inserted in the phone

Remove the battery from your phone for a few seconds. I found this step to be essential to reset the device. Put the battery back in.

While holding the camera button on the right side, press the power button. The phone will enter "bootloader" mode and you will see a tricolor bootscreen.

While in this mode, plug in your USB cable and you will hear the "ba-bing" USB sounds as the device connects

Unpack the ROM package you just downloaded and run RomUpdateUtility.exe. Follow the steps, check the appropriate boxes, and start the flash

Assuming all goes well, your phone will flash to the factory ROM and you can then troubleshoot what went wrong the first time that bricked your phone.

Oh no!! That still didn't work!? :eek: Or it worked but the flash failed with Error 270 or another error......... Never fear!! XDA-Developers is here! :) This next method is a bit more intense. It creates a "goldcard" which is used to SuperCID the Excalibur so that it doesn't care about what factory ROM you flash. Please have the factory (not a cooked) ROM ready to go.

** (This method is not intended for Newbie's and some enhanced knowledge of HTC devices and Windows is required to successfully work.)

** (Retry the second method several times with a few different factory ROMS before attemting the below)

Method 3: The third "goldcard" method is a bit more intensive and should be used as a "last resort" so follow closely:

(should unbrick ANY bricked Excalibur if performed correctly)

Get a cup of coffee or tea

You will need a working Donor HTC device with a microSD slot and a microSD card that is smaller than 1GB (will be formatted) to create "goldcard" image using QMAT tools as described below

You will need QMAT. Get it from http://revskills.de/index.html.

Go to the Download link and download the latest version and unpack QMAT

Have some coffee :)

Use a SD card reader (either USB for microSD adapter) in your PC to access the SD card through Windows. Format the SD card with FAT32.

*

Insert the SD card into the donor HTC device

and boot up the device. Connect the USB cable and establish an Activesync connection.

Open QMAT and go to the "Hardware Forensics" menu and select "Generate HTC Goldcard"

In "Select device key:" select the Excalibur

You will need the serial number fro the inserted SD card so click the "Get SD Card Serial from WINCE Device" button

Once the Serial number appears in the box, click the "Save Goldcard Image to WINCE SD" button below

If no errors pop up and all goes well, skip the next step

If you get an error or a popup saying "

Goldcard for newer devices isn't implemented in newer devices

", you must buy and register the software. Believe me, it's worth the small amount of $ you will spend to bring your expensive device back to life!

Now remove the SD card with the newly written Goldcard image from the Donor HTC device

Insert the SD card back into your PC using the microSD card reader adapter. Browse to the drive letter assigned to it. You will see no files on the SD card, this is normal.

(If, for some reason your PC sees the SD card as unformatted, something went wrong. Remove it and reinsert it into the Donor HTC device. The device should see the card as unformatted and ask you to format it, say yes. Now go back to the "*

Insert the SD card into the donor HTC device

" step above and repeat the steps)

Unpack your Dopod or other factory ROM and copy RUU_Signed.nbh to the SD card. Once it had finished copying, rename the file to EXCAIMG.nbh. Remove the SD card from the PC.

Make sure the Excalibur is off and insert the SD card

Enter bootloader mode as mentioned earlier (hold the camera button while pressing the power button). No need to connect the USB cable.

You will see a gray screen that says "loading". It will then find the EXCAIMG.nbh file and ask if you would like to start the update process. Follow the instructions and let the phone flash.

It will take 10-15 mins but your phone should boot fine and be back in action!

QMAT is a VERY powerful tool written by viperbjk that allows for full low level manipulation of HTC and WINCE tasks. Read all about it here http://revskills.de/index.html.

Many thanks to jockyw2001 for his amazing HTC device knowledge! Also thanks to all who contributed to this post.

Hope this tutorial helps!