Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Old HTC Desire phone not booting

I have an old HTC Desire phone that is not able to boot ... again. Last time this happened is about a year ago. Both back then and this time I had to spend the time all over since I could not remember what made it work last time. Thus the rationale for this posting.

What happens is that suddenly the phone just runs out of battery and then it will not boot again.It is stuck on the white HTC screen and you cannot turn it off using the power button. To turn it off you need to pull out the battery.

See more on a similar or the same problem here: Phone stuck on fastboot/hboot, buttons unresponsive

Find a available free SD card stick it into another phone and format the SDCard to FAT32 I used Linux for this since I have had problems doing this on windows for some unknown reason.

On linux you do the following


  1. Plug in your phone USB cable and wait until your OS recognizes the device
  2. Change to root user
  3. type mount and locate the device name of the SD Card and the directory on which it is mounted (typically something like /dev/sdb1 and /media/SDCARD_ID)
  4. type umount /media/SDCARD_ID
  5. now we are going to format the SDCARD (if you have any data on the card you will loose them) type mkdosfs -I -F32 /dev/YOUR_FOUND_DEVICE_NAME_FROM_STEP_3

    (please yet again note that the device name that I am refering to /dev/sdb1 might refer to a different drive on your system, when you format this drive all data will be deleted! Make sure you are pointing to the correct drive!)
  6. Now you have a SDcard that is ready
  7. Download the RUU file (officially release ROM from the manufacturer) I am using this one RUU_Bravo_Froyo_HTC_WWE_2.29.405.14_Radio_32.49.00.32U_5.11.05.27_release_224699_signed.exe
  8. This is the official way to install software using a Windows  OS (always make sure that you virus scan exe files downloaded from the internet, and also check the MD5 checksum to make sure that it indeed is the file that you expect it to be).
  9. If you phone can boot then you can re-flash on Windows by just running the exe with the phone connected by the USB cable.
  10. My phone however is missing the PB99IMG.zip file and the only way that you can reinstall the phone OS is by.
  11. Start the exe file, and follow the following screenshots


  12. Now do not go further, download and install the excellent tool Process Explorer 
  13. Start Process Explorer and find out where the temporary files from the RUU...exe file has been extracted.
  14. Select the exe process that you have just started
  15. Make sure that the lower process details pane is open
  16. Find the directory that contains Disk1. In either this directory or one of the most recent directories in the indicated temp folder look for a file named ROM.zip
  17. When you find it, copy it to the newly formatted SDCard
  18. Rename the file to fit you specific image (it differs from phone model to phone model. Mine is called (please note uppercase letters) PB99IMG.zip
  19. Eject the spare phone
  20. Turn it off and take out the SDCard. Put it into the broken phone
  21. Plug in the broken phone to a charger or to the PC USB slot
  22. Turn on the broken phone while pressing volume down button and then pressing the power button until you get to the HBOOT screen
  23. Just leave the phone and after a while it will show loading image
  24. It will now ask you a number of times, if you want to flash the image and if you want to reboot the phone.
  25. After rebooting you phone you should be good to go