My Android screwed up and is not booting up. It just hangs on the first splash screen and doesn’t know how to take it further. For all practical purposes, the device is bricked, but there has to be a way out of this. I don’t believe a device can be bricked this easily. In fact there is nothing like a bricked device. The solution should be as simple as unsoldering the flash chip(s) and re-soldering them back on. But that is in the case of primitive devices with primitive OSes.
In this case, the HTC Dream is almost like a computer in itself. The ROM is like a hard disk which has the OS information. The device itself tries to read the ROM and first loads the boot loader which then tries to load the OS from another part of the ROM. On a PC, the motherboard tries to find the bootloader from among all the available storage drives, such as hard disk, floppy, CD/DVD etc. If none is found then an error will be shown. Considering the device to be like a motherboard in a PC, if it doesn’t find a boot loader in the ROM, there has to be a possibility for it to look at other devices. Even the PSP has multiple flash areas and the device is truly bricked only if all the 4(I think) flash areas are corrupted. Again considering that the Dream is running an OS as advanced as Linux, there has to be some possibility that it checks other storages such as the SD Card to boot up. There has to be some setting which one has to open or unlock like how the Pandora Battery concept was born.
Once it is able to boot off the SD Card, then there is no issue at all. Simply put the OS on the SD Card and boot into the phone. Once the device is booted up, one can do recovery tasks and fix the ROM.
But in case the device doesn’t check for anything on the SD Card while booting up, then it is a problem. But there still has to be a way to do some hardware tweaks to get the correct flash into the ROM. There should be some contact points that one can tap into and force an image into the ROM. This should solve the problem. Of course doing this by oneself would totally void the warranty, but when one has a bricked phone, then what else choice is one left with?
I need to go into the details of how the bootloader and the ROMs are built and designed and see if there is any way that I can get a new ROM into the device. I hope I will be able to do something to it, or someone is able to find a way to force a new ROM onto the device and I am able to recover my dear G1.