Can you flash a phone that won't boot?

[ironLotus]

A little bit of setup before the actual questions:
Even though I had it in two ziplock bags, my Droid got a little bit of water in it and unfortunately stopped working. I took out the battery and dried it off as best I could, but after I followed some of the techniques here to properly dry it and put the battery back in, all I got was the camera LEDs flashing and the notification LED was changing colors. Then everything just stopped. I brought it into Verizon and since the water detectors didn't get wet, the CSR said that they would replace it, but they didn't have any in stock. They will be sending me a new (refurbished) one and I will have to return my old one.

I had my phone rooted with one of the mods built from the Froyo source. I tried to use RSD Lite to see if I could communicate with the hardware (it actually lit the LED next to the USB port which told me that it was getting power) but I couldn't get it to detect the phone.

1.) Is there a possible to connect to the phone to tell that it has been rooted?
2.) If so, is there any way to flash it back to stock... or at least render it unreadable?

Thanks in advance!

 

[cromo8]

doesnt matter honestly they dont check for that i have returned two phones that have been rooted, im returning another one today sicne SS4.5 corrupted my memory card

 

[RW-1]

In most cases, people who believe they have bricked it find that they can still boot into the bootloader, or recovery, and at that point, reflash and get their phone back.

If you cannot get anything when powering on, let alone into the bootloader where you can see it by RSD, I'd say you are stuck.

However that said, let it charge for a while then retry, could have shorted out the batt itself and the device isn't getting enough juice to do anything.

 

[ironLotus]

Thanks a lot for the quick responses!

cromo8: Well that's a relief. I had the screen go dead on my last Droid and I reflashed it blind (not as easy as it sounds).

RW-1: Thanks for your advice. Regarding the battery, when I took it in for them to look at, they tested the battery and said that even though it was dead when I brought it in, it still worked. When they put a working battery in my phone, it stayed as dead as it was with my battery.

 

[christim]

Sounds like this phone won't be powering up again. If it won't start by a fresh battery I doubt this one will become a "certified like-new" phone and make it back out into the general population.