[Droid Eris Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bftb0:
( Another phone on the precipice of being ruined by someone's cobbled-together "clockwork" recovery. )

If the /system flash memory partition got corrupted in a way that left a lot of pages marked as bad pages, then the /system partition will be "short", and only small ROMs will successfully load into it, if at all. That might be the cause of the above error messages.

But - because you are using Clockwork, there is really no way to know if that is the case, or if you simply have a whole bunch of corrupted ROM files on your SD card. That's because Clockwork does not verify ROM files before it starts flashing them - which allows total garbage to be flashed to the phone. (That's why Clockwork should never be used by newbs).

Here's what I would suggest you do.

- Make sure you are keeping the phone well charged. (Leaving the phone in HBOOT mode will discharge the battery quickly, even if it is plugged in to the charger, BTW).

- Report the exact bootloader version you have - probably 1.47.0000 or 1.49.0000, but it could be something other. Please be precise.

- With the power off, eject the SD card out of the slot and see if you can boot into the normal HBOOT menu with no SD card in the slot. Report your result.

- Boot into the recovery menu and tell us what version # of the recovery you have. If you can determine the details of how your friend attempted to root the phone, that might be pertinent. Again - precise details are valuable; vague hand-waving not so much.

- The Amon_RA recovery has a mode ("USB-MS toggle") which allows you to mount the SD card to the PC. Does your "Clockwork" recovery have this feature, or are you able to put files onto the micro-SD card using a media slot on a PC?

- Be aware that one or two people that were in situations that are very close to what you described ended up bricking their phones because they went from where you are now to attempting to use either a PB00IMG.ZIP ROM, or an RUU utility. Their phones went from bootable (in the way that yours is now) to bricks in that process.

What I would suggest you do at the moment is to find the SMALLEST Eris** ROM you can find, get it onto your SD card, verify that you didn't corrupt it, and then perform a "wipe data/factory reset" in your recovery and attempt to install it. If you get the same errors as above, then you should definitely NOT try to do a PB00IMG.ZIP or RUU installation. (The current gingerbread ROMs (e.g. GSB v1.4) are pretty small - they only use about 65% of the /system partition.)

I have a flashable "repair" file which might be applicable. It is not a "ROM" per se - it uses some low-level MTD (flash memory) repair techniques, and also flashes into place the original Amon_RA (v1.6.2) recovery, instead of whatever p.o.s. "Clockwork" recovery you currently have on the phone; but I regard it as something which should only be used as a last resort. But - without some more details and testing on your part, I don't feel comfortable about posting it up.

Let me know.

**PS I wanted to ask one more question - this is an Eris we are talking about, right? (I note you were posting in the Hero CDMA forum not so long ago).