Need help repairing frozen HTC Incredible

[HiJacK69]

I need help repairing my dinc. First, let me apologize for the long post, but I wanted to provide as much detail as possible.

My cousin dropped his phone in water and tried to dry it off. I don't know if he tried to turn it on after drying it off. Also, I don't know what attempts he has made to bring the phone back to life, but he has given up and handed the phone over to me. He figured since I am an IT guy and also do hardware repairs I would figure it out.

This is new to me because I've never owned a Smartphone before. He turned off his service on the dinc and used another Verizon phone he had lying around.

I've research different forums for a fix for the past few days, but nothing has worked. I’ve seen posts with similar symptoms, but in all cases they were able to get more functionality from their phone than mine. Also, my issue is related to water and not from a bad ROM upgrade. Here's a summary of things I've already tried:

• Dried the phone out with the rice in Ziploc bag trick for 3 days (phone is completely dried)

• Reformatted the micro sd card to fat32

• Did a system update

• Placed PB31IMG.zip into the root of the sd card

md5 checksum: 31bb1611a0fa8197d447c0438426717e

When I remove or rename the PB31IMG.zip file and hold the down button+power, here is the outcome for the following:

• Fastboot: Gives me the following options Bootloader, Reboot, Reboot Bootloader, & Power Dwn

Bootloader takes me back to the main HBoot screen.
Reboot would get me stuck on a continuous loop (stuck on the "HTC Incredible" white screen) and freeze
Reboot Bootloader just takes me back to the Fastboot menu
Power Dwn would do the same thing as the Reboot

• Recovery: does the same thing as Reboot; it would freeze at the white "HTC Incredible" screen

• Clear Storage: does the same thing as above

• Factory Reset: does the same thing as above

Each time it gets stuck at the white HTC Incredible boot up screen, I would have to pull the battery. Hitting/holding the power button doesn't seem to do anything.


From what I've been reading, I don't think the phone is bricked, since it still turns on, has limited functions, & I can get to the HBoot screen. The only thing I haven’t tried is reinstalling the OS (not sure if the OS is included in the PB31IMG.zip file)? Also, I was going to try to reformat the hard drive (just in case the partition is damaged).


The phone has never been rooted and I am not trying to root/unroot the phone... just trying to repair the phone. The phone has the S-ON.


I have uploaded a 10 min. YouTube video so you can see what I'm dealing with. Any help would be much appreciated. If there is anything you want me to try or anything you want to know that I may have left out, please don't hesitate to ask. At this point, I'm willing to try anything.

[IVXX]

Sadly I may not be much help, from what I understand the OS is in the kernel which is included in the ROM though u can flash a custom kernel. I actually was hoping you could help me though too. My phone has stopped reading my memory card and I don't have access to ADB (I do have an older pc with no internet I got the basic SDK tools on) I'm on stock 2.2 ROM with S off I have a recovery though and don't care if I have to root to solve the issue, I just don't know any way to fix the usb and SD card issue without ADB. I was wondering if formatting the drive as u mentioned would help as I know their is undoubtedly a prob with the partition somewhere but I don't know how you go about doing such a thing. I'd really really appreciate any help I've been racking my brain for weeks, I have a few log reports if it helps. I hear that flashing the firmware again will help and is really like to try but where do I find the right firmware and how do I apply it at this point...do I just make a PB31IMG.zip to flash it?