[Droid Eris Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bftb0:
This is hopeful.

What I am going to suggest is that you proceed carefully by flashing as little as possible to the phone; the first step is to get the engineering bootloader onto the phone. (In principle, this could allow recovery of 100% of your wife's current configuration and data.) The top-level "outline" of the plan I have in mind looks like this:

- flash ONLY the 1.49.2000 S-OFF bootloader to the phone using the Root PB00IMG.zip file and the "toastcfh" battery pull trick using HBOOT.

- soft-boot a custom recovery to the phone without flashing it (this uses the PC utility "fastboot")

- Immediately make a Nandroid backup of the current contents of the phone.

- Perform a diagnostic "flash" that will report on the state of the MTD partitions.

- Make a decision on how to proceed from that information.

Before we begin, though, we should get a couple of preliminaries out of the way.

(A) You need to have a method to be 100% sure that the files you download to your SD card are in "perfect" condition. If you don't know what a "MD5" signature is, you should review what that means and then download a utility (either from Microsoft, or even better, an opensource GUI tool) to your PC that will allow you to compute "MD5" signatures of files that you download from the Internet.

Simple mistakes in transferring large files to an SD card can cause them to be truncated or corrupted, and this can have disastrous consequences if you flash a corrupted file to your phone. Making sure that you check the "MD5" checksum of the files you download - after you have transferred them to the SD card will prevent this kind of trouble. (This type of error might be what caused your trouble with the "update.zip" you used which failed a verification/signature step)

(B) The method I am going to suggest requires you to work at the command line of your PC, and also get some USB drivers installed. The easiest way to install the drivers is probably to run the "Official 2.1 RUU" Utility right up to the point where you would attempt to flash the phone - but DO NOT actually begin the flashing procedure. You can get that RUU Utility from this page:

Consolidated HTC RUU, Leak, and OTA Downloads

The RUU Utility you are looking for is listed on that page as "[ 2.36.605.1 ] a.k.a. "Leak-V3" (or MR3/"Official" RUU) - (Eclair/2.1)" -

RUU_Desire_C_Verizon_WWE_2.36.605.1_release_signed _with_driver.exe

Note that the file size and MD5 checksums are given on the above-mentioned page; use this download to familiarize yourself with computing MD5 checksums with whatever tool you decided to use.

Here's some other downloads that you should pull down to your PC in preparations for all of this:

1) The Amon_RA custom recovery (v1.6.2) - file name: recovery-RA-eris-v1.6.2.img

2) The ROOT PB00IMG.zip file - [ 2.19.605.1 ] Find this in the above URL "Consolidated HTC RUU..." - file name: Eris_RootROM_v2.19.605.1_PB00IMG.zip

3) The fastboot utility for your PC/Mac/Linux machine; you can get this from HTC about midway down this page. (Note that this page also provides you a MD5 checksum.)

I would suggest that you get your PC set up with drivers, and verify that you can communicate with your phone with the fastboot (command-line) utility, before you start doing anything to the phone. This could go smoothly, but probably depends on what O/S version you have on your PC. As I said, the easiest way to get drivers installed onto your PC is to run the RUU Utility right up to the point where you would begin flashing stuff to your phone (but then you exit that utility without actually starting the flashing operation.).

In both cases - the "dry run" of the RUU to install the USB drivers, and the communications check with the "fastboot" tool, you will need to put the phone into fastboot mode; this is done by powering the phone off completely, and then turning it on by holding the Send key and End/Power key together (make sure to press the Send key first). If you do this (and the phone and PC are connected with the USB cable), you can verify communication between the PC and the phone with the fastboot command with:

fastboot devices

If the USB drivers on your PC have been installed correctly and you are communicating with the phone, the above command will print your "device ID number" on the screen.

Once you get to this point, come back here and give a status update, and I'll provide some further instructions. (Also, since I don't know what your skills are - you might mention whether you are familiar with using the command line or other rooting/phone manipulation methods - reading between the lines, I see that you are more skilled than most of the newbs that come here looking for help)

If you get this all set up, you can also review the following descriptive article (with pictures) on how to do the PB00IMG.ZIP install - including the "battery pull trick".

You can also review a description of how to make a Nandroid backup.

bftb0

PS - One more thing to remember. While the phone is in an unusual state, it is a good idea to keep it fully charged. Don't let it sit in either HBOOT or FASTBOOT modes for extended periods of time - the phone will discharge even if it is plugged in to the charger. You can leave it in that mode for 5-10 minutes, but don't let it sit in either of those modes unattended.