HTC Eris :: Visual - PB00IMG.ZIP Update Method

My purpose behind this "a picture is worth 1000 words" thread is twofold:

1) For newbs that experience some trouble(s) getting the inital stages of "getting root" to happen correctly, it is helpful for them to know what things should look like when everything goes the way it should. That makes it much easier to recognize it when something goes wrong.

2) Make it very clear when to do the "battery pull" if you are interested in only installing the S-OFF bootloader (and nothing else) using Toastcfh's "battery pull trick".

In the first image below, the Eris has been restarted by simultaneously pressing the Vol-down and End (power) buttons, and a PB00IMG.ZIP file has been placed in the root folder of the SD card:

If the "PB00IMG.ZIP" file was not found on the SD card, the list of files shown above would flash across the screen and disappear very quickly - less than one second.

If this is what you experience, there are a couple of possible reasons why this might have occurred:

There is no file named PB00IMG.ZIP in the root folder of the SD card
You put the file there, but misspelled the name
The SD Card needs to be re-formatted **
The SD card is "questionable" - replace with a "beter" card **

** I never experienced these problems with the Verizon-supplied SD card, but other folks have reported that this solved a problem where they were sure the file was present in the root folder, but apparently was not recognized.

The important thing to point out here is that the PB00IMG.ZIP files are large - as much as 100 MB. Merely reading the file to compute a checksum or crypto signature from a flash device takes many tens of seconds: if the file is found by the phone, it will spend some time chewing on it. If you see the above list of files (in green) flash by and nothing happens, then it is absolutely clear that the phone did not "find" the file - for whatever reason.

In the image above, we see that the phone is reading the file, as indicated by the blue progress bar in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. This process takes a fair amount of time - perhaps as much as a full minute.

Note that the HTC crypto signature is over the whole zip file (excluding the first 256 bytes); at this point, the phone is simply checking that the .zip file has the correct crypto signature - it is not even unpacking the zip file (yet)

In the next image, the phone is beginning to unpack the zip file into separate components: the crypto sig check has succeeded, and the phone says nothing exceptional, other than "Checking"

In the next image below, the phone presents a list of images that are in the PB00IMG.ZIP file. The list shown only tells you what the function of the image file is, but does not display the exact file name in the .zip file. (Unpack the PB00IMG.ZIP yourself on your PC if you are curious).

The phone also asks you if you "Do you want to start update?".

NOTE: This point in time is extremely critical if you are going to do the battery pull method!

Note that the second item in the list, (#2) is listed as "BOOTLOADER". What will happen if you choose to perform the update, is that the new bootloader from the PB00IMG.ZIP file will be flashed right away. This sort of makes sense: it is the new bootloader that is responsible for installing all the other new images in the PB00IMG.ZIP file.

The bootloader is quite small - about 512k bytes - so it flashes onto the phone very quickly. As soon as this finishes (less than one second after you start the update), the phone screen will go dark, indicating that a reboot is in progress.

IF YOU INTEND TO USE THE BATTERY PULL METHOD, YOU NEED TO BE PREPARED FOR THIS MOMENT, WITH THE COVER ALREADY OFF THE PHONE - YOU'LL HAVE 3-4 SECONDS BEFORE THE PHONE REBOOTS AND BEGINS TO CONTINUE WITH THE REST OF THE ROM FLASHING. YOU CAN PULL THE BATTERY AS SOON AS YOU SEE THE SCREEN GO DARK. (The remaining steps shown below will not occur if you pull the battery.)

Toastcfh on XDA was the first to suggest this method; it is especially useful if you want to create a backup of your "factory" 1.5 system.

The photo images used for this documentation were taken from a manual upgrade of 1.16.605.1 to 1.17.605.1 (MR1 to MR2 update on Cupcake). Both of those updates use the exact same (S-ON) bootloader, so in the pictures which follow, we won't notice a difference in version numbers or appearance of "S-OFF" at the top of the screen. But if we were doing the "root" PB00IMG.ZIP upgrade, we would see the new version number and also "S-OFF", as the new bootloader would be "live" at this point.

In the image below, (following the reboot) we see what appears to be a complete repeat of what we saw at the beginning of the process: it appears as if the .zip file is being unpacked all over again, complete with the blue progress bar showing in the upper right hand corner of the screen:

Again, we see the "Checking" message (below). But rest assured, the update process has been launched, and will continue without prompting until the end. Don't let the fact that you are seeing a repeat of these same screens you saw earlier throw you - that is normal. And again, since the file involved is large - 100 MB - it takes a little while for the phone to chug through these steps.

Now the updater lists the (functional) contents of the PB00IMG.ZIP file, and starts the update process without stopping to ask permission. Note that the bootloader is no longer mentioned (in item #2, or anywhere): it was already installed!

When the flash memory is being written, the progress bar in the upper right hand corner of the screen will display in red (as shown below)

If the updater is merely unpacking an image file (within the .zip file), the progress bar will show up in a black color as shown below. (This will be most apparent for large images such as the "system" image)

When the update is complete, the system will pause and ask you if you want to reboot. (In the case of the root PBOOIMG.ZIP update, the new S-OFF bootloader is up and running at this point, so if you wanted to toggle it in to fastboot mode and flash Amon_RA's recovery image, you could do that.