[Droid Incredible Android Development] madman34:
SUCESS !!!! after 3 days I can get in 1st time every time

Ok so after hundreds of attempts over 3 days with Sandisk cards of all sizes and an 8gig ADATA, I saw where serveral people reported sucess with PNY cards. I personally did not beleive that the card could make a difference but I remembered a 4gig class 4 PNY I have in my TP2 that has never seen my DINC but does have about 2 gigs of stuff on it like pics and a bunch of crap. I decided to give it another shot and think I might be onto somthing here, maybe not but maybe. Long read here but please follow my logic as I diagnose quirky issues in complex systems for a living.

My process flow from start to finish:

1) Downloaded everything Shadowmite said to get prepared for battle with loading drivers and SDK and such on 3 machines, WINXP SP2, WIN7, Fedora 12.

2) Started with stock VZW provided 2 gig Sandisk and set the loop running and tried Shadow's process on all 3 machines with not even so much as a hint of love.

3) Heard about different cards of different sizes being sucessful and different methodes of putting DINC into recovery so tried them all on all machines with ADATA 8 gig, Sandisk 8 gig, Sandisk 2 gig, even formated them empty, no love.

4) Saw the PNY sucess story this morning so decided to get one later when I was near my office, but remembered that my TP2 has a 4 gig PNY in it and never been in my DINC so lets try since all hardware is here, SUCESS on very first try, but keep reading because some interesting points and observations were made.

Took out battery, put in 4 gig PNY, held down opto button and power while putting in battery with USB cable plugged in, with device manager up in windows, shows "composite ADB interface" under Android Phone header when menu comes up on phone, press power to accept 1st entry, green lines of boot text then next menu with recovery as 2nd option, select recovery and hit power, THIS IS WHERE THINGS CHANGED, instead of "composite ADB interface" disapearing as the phone went into recovery it blinked out and came right back and stayed. Note that I did not have the loop running at all, but when I did adb shell I got what we want to see. KEEP READING as the next test steps are important to answering some lingering questions. I unplugged the USB from the PC and went to the other 2 computers and logged into the ADB shell without doing anything to the phone. I then proceeded to finish the root process, after which did some tests to get answers and here they are:

Q1) does card matter ? Absolutely, 3 days of banging and not a hint, the only thing in the process is the PNY card and that it has never been in the INC before, and even a formatted Sandisk does nothing, I get in every time with the PNY, except when I let the DINC boot normally and prepare the card, then I have to clear off the files that the DINC puts on it to prepare it and it works every time again !

Q2) does PC/OS/Drivers/loop running matter? Not in so much as that whatever you use is loaded up corectly and able to see the ADB interface of the phone. Remember, I do not even run the loop and get in every time, so the PC does not even have to be talking to the phone for the magic condition to happen.

Conclusions:

Looks to me like a few things are going on that I will put in my 2 cents based on observation. 1st of all I am wondering if during the boot to recovery that the phone looks for certain files that it writes to the card to see if it is the phone's card or the service center's ADB boot recovery card ??? Not finding the files it may look at the media signature which includes manufacturer code, media descriptor, size, class, other data that the device needs in order to talk properly to it, and if some digit in there matches then both criteria are satisfied and GOTO INIT ADB DAEMON UPON RECOVERY and leave persistent. Because I would code this like this I could see where someone at HTC might also. Hope this helps somebody ;-) Thanks for the path home Shadowmite ;-)