[myTouch 3G, Magic General] 2of11:
Hey everyone,

it so happened yesterday that after successfully toying around with some pre-made ROMs I tried to flash my Magic with the Google I/O Device recovery and apparently bricked it in the process. But let me start at the beginning.

What I had running fine was Anrdoid 2.0 for the 32A from here. Under the hood I was running Amon_RAs recovery "recovery-RA-sapphire-v1.5.1H.img" from here and my SPL was the Engineering SPL 1.33.2010 from here. Everything was working fine so far and I was happy toying around with the Android 2.0 goodness.

However, ultimately I wanted to deploy my custom built of Android 1.6 from the source repository. Therefore my first step was to make sure that the vanilla Android 1.6 without modifications works on the device. What I did is I went to the HTC developer site for the Google I/O Device here and downloaded the system image for Android 1.6, called "signed-google_ion-img-14721.zip". I fastbooted system, boot and (the empty) userdata that were in that package, to not much avail. The device would be stuck at the Vodafone splash (mine is a Vodafone branded 32A). I made sure to wipe everything and fastbooted those again, just to make sure. Again no results. Then I wanted to fastboot the whole package instead of the individual imgs with "fastboot update <file> -w". The consistency check then told me:

checking version-bootloader... FAILED

Device version-bootloader is '1.33.2010'.

Update requires '1.33.2005' or '1.33.0005' or '1.33.3004' or '1.33.3005'.

I happily got SPL .2005 from the above link, and installed through the Amon's recovery image. Just in case I tried to boot the device, but it didn't do much. So I went ahead and tried to fastboot update the package again. It then told me:

checking version-baseband... FAILED

Device version-baseband is '3.22.20.17'.

Update requires '2.22.19.26I'.

I was a little sceptical but went back to the HTC developer site and downloaded the radio that it cried for, named "ota-radio-2_22_19_26I.zip". I installed that again through Amon's recovery image (which is awesome btw, thank you very much!). It seemed rather successful but after a reboot the device would still not boot, nothing new to me. However, when I wanted to enter fastboot (back key), HBOOT (vol down key) or recovery (home key), nothing would happen anymore, it was just stuck at the red Vodafone splash and fastboot which would usually spring open right away would just trigger the regular boot.

I went through dozens of forum posts where people describe the same problem and it appears that no one found a solution so far. When I press the ball it comes up with a black screen and a blue LED. It also happily charges when I connect it to a charger or USB, but that is about as much as I can do. Plugging/unplugging a million times and trying different combinations of button presses and battery insert/removals didn't bring it back to life, either. The device is not connecting over USB (not as an Android or unknown device or anything) so that adb or fastboot are useless.

Have I bricked my phone? Does anyone have a solution? Please take the time to read the whole post before replying because I took the time to describe my problem and the steps I took in detail.

I'm also curious what exactly went wrong, can someone enlighten me? From what I could tell the HTC developer device (Google I/O) is a 32A so the hardware should be identical. What was my mistake?

I'd appreciate any input you guys might have!