[Hero, G2 Touch General] Uqbar:
[SOLVED. READ BELOW FOR DETAILS]

HI all.

I've managed to brick my Hero (T-Mobile G2) by flashing the wrong SPL file.

To make things more difficult I've lost the USB cable.

I can still:

Power+Menu (three vibrations + blinking green)

Power+Back (Fastboot)

Power+Search (Storageclean)

Power+VolumeDown (HBOOT, SD checking ...)

Is there a way to reflash the right SPL with one of these menus?

I've not found any similar case here and in MoDaCo.

Thanks in advance.

[SOLUTION]

This case is particular as there is no system available to use the "adb shell" commands. Nonetheless it's recoverable.

At least in one case :-)

Almost everything comes from MoDaCo.

Despite I would say I'm not a real newbie, this time was a little bit harder than with other embedded devices for some reasons I'll explain later.

What do you need?

1. A miniUSB cable. Now I know that any miniUSB can work.

2. A Windows XP PC. A Linux or Mac OS X should also work. Read below.

3. The right USB software driver (I used this one) otherwise it won't work.

4. A modified recovery image (I used this one) that has flashing capabilities from the SD.

5. A working SPL (Second Program Loader) image (I used this one, thanks to the enlightner.

6. A system ROM image (again, I used this one).

What was the problem?

I used to play also with a Magic and still had an SPL zip of its on my SD.

I already had rooted and modded my Hero with MoDaCo's mod.

By mistake I flashed that SPL zipped image into my Hero and since then nothing was working any more.

The boot process was simply stopping at the "G2 Touch T-Mobile" screen up to the complete battery drain.

The directions found here were ineffective due to the fact that there was no running system to execute the "adb shell" commands.

I am using 99.99% of the time a Linux laptop but decided to get a Windows XP PC in order to simplify the troubleshooting while asking people for help and hints.

Maybe in the future I'll dare to reproduce the problem and solution with Linux. Maybe,

But let's see a stepwise procedure.

How I solved it

(impossible to me without MoDaCo's and englightner's help, kudos to them)!

0. Unpack the USB driver and the recovery image ZIP files somewhere into your PC. Put the SPL and the system ROM image zip files into the SD card. Use the root directory of the FAT partition in case you have already partitioned it.

1. Switch off the Hero (by pulling the battery out).

2. Turn it on again without the USB cable in by pressing the back and the power keys. I've noticed some different behaviour if you keep the cable plugged in.

3. A white screen (the Initial Program Loader aka IPL aka Fastboot) will pop up.

4. Plug the USB cable in both the Hero and the PC. The screen will now show in red "FASTBOOT USB".

5. Windows should warn you about some unknown hardware having been plugged (Android 1.0). Ask for a manual installation by browsing to the directory where you unpacked the USD driver. Install it. No reboot is required (unbelievable!).

6. Open a command line session on your PC (Start-->Execute-->CMD on Windows), change the current directory (cd) to where modified recovery image has been unpacked and where both the fastboot.exe and cm-hero-recovery.img files are located.

7. From the command line run this command (without the quotes): "fastboot boot cm-hero-recovery.img". You'll see a green progression bar rising on the right side of the Hero screen and after 1 second you'll see the modified recovery image running.

8. At this point I tried to recover a previously saved nandroid backup. But for some reason this time the recovery was complaining about a chown/chmod not being able to change the permissions on a system file! So it's useless to try it.

9. Instead I asked to flash the SPL zip file. It worked fine and I asked for a reboot.

10. the final step was to pop the recovery tool again (Home+power, keep the home pressed until you'll see the friendly black and green screen) and to slash the system ROM zip file.

I also reset all user data before doing it. I'm not sure whether this reset is required.

11. At the reboot the flashed system ROM was happily waiting for me to customise the settings.

12. As a last check, I rebooted once again the Hero to see whether the solution was permanent. And it was.

Few suggestions for seniors.

Please, please be patient with newbies. This could be the first time they hit the wall and panic and frustration can play an important and irritating role.

Please, please be as precise as possible. What a senior thinks is an implicit piece of information, can lead to hours of frustration for the newbie. For example, the SUB driver installation is not mentioned very often in any thread. It looks trivial. It's not.

Please, please be positive to newbies. By encouraging them they'll become less newbies than they are now.

And a few suggestions for juniors

(like me).

Please, please don't panic! If there's a solution, you don't need to panic. If there's none, you don't need to panic as well.

Please, please be precise in describing the problem (I've not been myself). Small unseen details can matter a lot.

Please, please don't blame people for late answers. Very probably they are busy with their own job, life or hobbies.

Please, please remember that if you are in trouble is very probably due to your own mistakes. Not someone else's. You are playing with low level stuff, not just application settings.

If you decide to follow someone's directions, please do it carefully. If you take some decisions on your own, please document them in the thread.