Newbs: Recovery and what it means for you.

[doug piston]

I've seen quite a few threads here about phones stuck on a black screen, white screen or the HTC screen. In most cases a simple battery pull and reboot fixes this, if not, this where a recovery comes in very handy. If you flash a rom and the phone then fails to boot, it could be a number different reasons for it, bad download or the creator of the rom broke something. This where you would boot into recovery and do a simple nandroid restore. It is nearly impossible to brick a phone these days. It takes a whole lot more then flashing a rom to brick a phone.

So cliff notes:
If phone will not boot up
1. Don't panic
2. Reboot into recovery
3. Do a nandroid restore
4. Enjoy working phone.

This will fix about 99% of all issues with a phone not booting again. If this does not fix it, you are probably trying something else and doing way more then loading up a rom, and feel free to ask for help.


The easiest way to have a always working nandroid restore on your phone is to do a simple back before you flash anything new. This will make sure you always have a working rom with all your SMS, MMS and personal phone settings saved.

I hope this helps a few you out. If not i just killed 10 mins out of a boring day, so I see it as a win, win.

[SLOflatlander]

would you say that boot takes longer than usual immediately after a fresh nandroid backup? cause i tried to stop the ota update with a few adb shell commands, and when i rebooted i got stuck in a boot loop. so i booted into recovery and restored from a nand backup, and the phone was stuck in the verizon part of the boot up for several minutes, and i started to freak out, but then it worked lol

[SLOflatlander]

oh and one more question, if i decide to flash a custom rom, i know its necessary to wipe the phone first, but then how am i supposed to get everything back on? can i install from titanium and launcher pro backups? or do i need to redo it all manually. and does ti backup save app settings as well? or do those need to be re done too

[doug piston]

There is no way to get it back. That is the down fall of flashing new roms, everething must be deleted

[SLOflatlander]

then what do you do when the rom is updated? can i just copy backups to my desktop then put them back on after rom is installed? do you need to wipe sd card as well? maybe i could save all the stuff to sd card?

[doug piston]

When a real consistent rom comes out, as long as you stay on the rom you dont really have to wipe. But moving from a rom to a different one you must wipe.

[HTCincredible]

My concern is what if I need to restore my phone back to the way it was when I first got from Verizon? Is that a possibility?

thanks!

[dyrosto]

This tutorial goes into detail about returning the droid incredible back to stock once you've rooted and used custom roms. Howto: Root the HTC Droid Incredible ? Technology ? Jonamerica.com

[HTCincredible]

That answered all my questions.

[givmedew]

would you say that boot takes longer than usual immediately after a fresh nandroid backup? cause i tried to stop the ota update with a few adb shell commands, and when i rebooted i got stuck in a boot loop. so i booted into recovery and restored from a nand backup, and the phone was stuck in the verizon part of the boot up for several minutes, and i started to freak out, but then it worked lol

I think he is more talking about the very very first screen not the boot animation. For example I got stuck at the very very first screen today after going from rooted 2.1 to skyraider 1.9 and then doing a full restore from titanium backup which was proably a bad idea. After that I the phone would not boot at all never even got to the boot animation. So I simply held down the trackball button and then booted into recovery and nadroid restored my 2.1 rooted backup