Need help repairing frozen HTC Incredible

HiJacK69

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Oct 9, 2011
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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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHXDJl6G2X4
 

PvilleComp

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Jun 13, 2010
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Looks lke you already tried this step, but for he sake of completeness...

Download the Froyo PB31IMG image from here:
Stock Images | PvilleComp's

Check the MD5. Make sure the file is PB31IMG.zip (Not .zip.zip if you have hide known file extensions enabled delete one of the .zip's) Then flash in HBOOT. HBOOT should see the file without you doing anything and prompt if you want to load the image. Press the power button to say yes.

If that does not work - download the RUU .exe file. You'll need to install HTC Sync to get the proper drivers installed from here:
HTC Mobile Phone Support - DROID INCREDIBLE by HTC (Verizon) - Downloads

Then run the .exe and follow the directions included in the exe.

Hope this helps.