[fjrooney]

I ran into a range of difficulties in flashing my phone, and I include these here to help people who might run into the same problems. I have an Alltel Touch Pro.

After studying the posts at PPCGeeks.com, especially in then EnergyROM thread, I had a variety of ways of handling situations. It was good to have studied these in advance. Thank you to the people who contributed on these threads that are important references:

Here I tried to paste in the addresses of helpful threads, but the board won't allow me to include threads since I haven't posted 10 times yet. Sorry.

On flashing this phone in general: at xda-developers, thread 508084
Flashing from the SD card: at ppcgeeks, thread 61333
On saving "bricked" phones: at ppcgeeks, thread 51508

My first flash was to the update for the phone from the HTC website, version 2.01.671.1.
Hermann_C_ALLTEL_WWE_2.01.671.1_1.12.20F_Alltel_2. 00_30033_Ship.exe
I flashed it from the program with the ActiveSync 4.5 connection I have been using on my XP SP3 laptop computer. That went fairly easily. It seemed to drop the connection, but it did the update.

I also connect to an Exchange server (2007), and the policy on the server requires some security settings including locking and a password to access the device. I discovered with that ROM that when a call came in, it only gave the lock screen, but did not show the number or name of the caller. Even if I unlocked the phone quick enough, there was no screen for the caller information. So I decided to dive in and try an EnergyROM.

After reading, the one I was most comfortable with was EnergyROM_21885_HERMAN_17.Dec.2009_StandardM2.5_Ma xManila. I tried to flash that and ran into hours of problems.

After the first failed attempt, my heart started racing for fear I had bricked the phone. The thread on dealing with bad flash operations was extremely helpful. It is helpful to remember that there is a flash image on the ROM, but there is also a working image in the phone that is what the phone normally boots from after a soft reset or power down. If the working image is not corrupted, it will still boot, and it can still connect via ActiveSync, etc. So if the flashing of the ROM goes badly, do not do the hard reset. Just let it boot the normal way, if it is able to do so.

I tried to flash from the PC, and the connection would die partway through. It even brought down the PC to a Blue Screen Of Death with the message "Multiple IRP Complete Requests." I tried in different states (bootloader, etc.) and nothing worked. The PC could not make a connection with the Bootloader mode either. The phone showed a USB connection, but the ActiveSync could not identify it.

I tried the flash using SD card method, but whenever I had a file with RAPHIMG.nbh, it would show a "Loading" message and would stay there for many minutes. I waited out at least 10 because of the message I had seen in the RUU programs, but it was stuck. Wondering if the card was the problem, I tried to reformat the SD card using both the XP formatting utility and one I downloaded from the SD Card organization SDcard.org, SDFormatter v2.0. I always got the same results with the phone stuck on the Loading message. The card was a 8G microSDHC, and from some comments in the threads I wondered if that was the problem, but I didn't have a smaller one to test. I later found out that that was not the problem either.

I couldn't flash anything successfully, even though the phone said "Security Unlocked." I tried to flash the CMONEX unlocker, and that wouldn't work either. By the way, this is what was on the Bootloader screen (if that is what it is properly called) when I entered that mode, and this apparently came from the HTC updater flash operation.

Security unlocked
RAPH800
SPL-0.40.0000
MicroP-Herman (LED) v0C85
MicroP-Herman (KEY) v0685
PSOC-Raph STAGE_EVT v20

Then I had the idea that the newer Windows Mobile Device Center might be one more option I could try since I had access to a Vista x64 machine. I downloaded the WMDC software, installed it, established the connection, and attempted to flash the hardSPL first of all because I was suspecting that as the problem. It worked! From there it was easy to flash the ROM.

I know this was a long description, but I put the details here so perhaps people will not have to go through the trials and errors. The gist of it is: if you are using that updated ROM from HTC or Alltel (it was distributed by Alltel as well), even though it says Security unlocked, it won't work. To get the CMONEX hardSPL on the phone, ActiveSync on an XP machine won't work. WDMC on Vista did work. Once the CMONEX hardSPL was in place, I could flash ROMs from the PC or from the SD card without any problems.

Hope this helps someone.

Thanks to all of you who contributed in the several threads I read, including this one.