[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] ayato kamina:
Hi XDA Community!

Completely bone-headed n00b here (is there any other kind)?

Firstly, a quick background:

HTC Desire, rooted, S-Off, 16 gig Class 4 SD card with 1 gb ext4 partition

I was flashed with a perfectly working Leedroid 2.2f rom, overkill backed up with Clockwork, AmonRa, Titanium, MyBackup Pro, complete SD card backup (you name it, I did it), then wiped and flashed ownhere's Rom because I was running out of app space. The flash was successful then I proceeded to backup ownhere's rom after re-installing all my apps and I think that's where the problem began. I began my first backup with Clockwork via Rom Manager, but was not getting any response, so I rebooted my phone into Clockwork Recovery and backed up ownhere's rom there. After that, I could not turn on my phone.

I'd appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction. As of right now, my phone goes into a vicious boot loop whenever I try to turn it on. I can still get into hboot by holding down the power button and volume down button and then get into Android system recovery (Amon Ra Recovery, build: RA-desire-v2.0.0) by selecting "recovery", but when I try to do a nandroid restore, the error message I get is:

E:Can't mount /dev/block/mmcblk0p1 (or /dev/block/mmcblk0)

(No such file or directory)

E:Can't mount SDCARD:/nandroid/

I've googled many times and have attempted to follow the steps outlined by various tutorials with similar sounding problems, but unfortunately to no avail. I've tried formatting my SD card on my computer, re-partitioning the SD card on my phone (not sure if that was successful), wiping it, attempting to restore it, attempting to flash it, but I keep getting that same error message above in the end.

I certainly don't deserve it after what I've done, but any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for having the patience to read.

EDITED: Below are the steps I took to resolve the issue.

First and foremost, I'd like to point out that prior to encountering this problem (or any problem for that matter), I did a very thorough job of backing up my entire phone multiple times through various methods, but it turns out I only really needed a single nandroid backup and mariosraptor's help. Still, better safe than sorry, I say, which is ironic considering what I did to my phone. Ah well.

Anyway, after running into my problem as described in my OP (original post), the following steps were needed to restore functionality to the phone:

1) With the phone turned off, I booted it into Fastboot by either a) holding down volume rocker+power on button, then choosing "fastboot" or b) holding back button+power on button, which takes you straight into "fastboot".

2) Once in fastboot, I connected my phone to my computer via USB cable.

3) I'm not sure if I needed it running or not, but I then ran Android SDK (a program I used back when I first got my phone and was tinkering with rooting and forcing apps to install onto the SD card before I learned about SD card partitioning and AP2SD/AP2SD+ supported roms and now DATA2SD/DATA2EXT). This program can be downloaded here and an example of how it's used is here, but I'm assuming (I know I shouldn't assume, but I can only describe things I've done or have already done) anyone who as gotten this far already has this program and used it before, even with limited knowledge.

4) I then went into my Start Menu in Windows and ran command prompt. The simplest way to run command prompt, I find, is to type "cmd" into the run dialog, then enter.

5) Once command prompt popped up, I typed in cd\ to change the directory to C:\ and then entered in cd android-sdk-windows/tools to open the directory to c:\android-sdk-windows\tools (I just noticed that you enter in /backsplashes, but end up with \forwardslashes, weird!).

6) I then typed in the fastboot commands as outlined by mariosraptor, that is, I entered "fastboot oem enableqxdm 0" pressed enter, let it finish, then typed in "fastboot reboot" and enter. Wait for phone to reboot, could take a while.

I'm hoping for most people those are all the steps needed in order to restore the phone, but in my case, after entering "fastboot oem enableqxdm 0", I received an error saying: "The program can't start because AdbWinApi.dll is missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem." I was about to re-install when mariosraptor provided me with the AdbWinApi.dll file here. This is rapidshare link so it will expire. My suggestion is to search for it somewhere (google) if you run into the same missing file as me.

My problem actually didn't stop there either. I found my phone was stuck on the boot animation, although I supposed I could've left it even longer just to make sure it wasn't working, but I actually took my battery out to shut the phone down. I then proceeded to do a nandroid restore to a previous backup I had done before I created this whole problem. I did that by booting the phone into recovery by holding down volume rocker+power button, selecting "recovery", then selecting "nandroid backup/restore" and letting the process go through fully, which took quite some time.

Anyway, it's been a long 20 or so hours for me. I'm going to go rest now. Props again to mariosraptor!