Hi, I just wanted to put my 2 cents here, perhaps there is someone who may find it useful.
Device: HTC Desire with 16GB class 6 card, rooted, Teppic74's pre-rooted stock ROM with AP2SD+
Symptom: boot loop (hungs at "quietly brilliant" splash screen). Usually, removing the battery and restarting the device helps.
But... last week, it did not work at all, I could not boot into Android at all. I was abroad, have switched SIM cards so I thought that would be the issue, but finally it has turned out that it was the SD card. With the card removed, boot was just fine. However, due to AP2SD+, almost everything essential is on the EXT3 partition (of 1 GB size, used about 700 MB).
I have bought a new 16GB class 6 card to be on the safe side and I wanted to copy the EXT3 partition contents to it. However, I could not read that partition (gparted Live CD, various Windows tools, Ubuntu 11 as a VMWare image, finally Ubuntu 11.0 booted from CD - none of them worked). The partition was definitely there, but contents could not be read.
In the meantime, I have created 15GB FAT32 and 1GB EXT3 partitions on the new card. I was totally shocked when I realized that I could only access the 15GB part, the 1 GB EXT3 was somehow lost in space, all of the above methods (+ mouting the phone as USB storage from recovery) failed to recognize that part, so the new card was reported as being a 15GB storage
(
It came even worse, when I have inserted this 15GB (?) FAT32 card and tried to install a few apps that I had before on the EXT3 partition. I have no idea how, but I had no root any longer. I have tested it with a few emulators, tried the command su but it has failed, also programs that aks for root rights if available (e.g. ES file maneger, etc.) had no root authorization.
I have tried to ru Unrevoked3, and it reported everything is done, but obviously this was not the case. Then, with the new card inserted, I have tried to re-flash the same Teppic74 ROM again, including the AP2SD+ mod. Surprisingly, it went extremely quick and apparently without errors. I wanted to re-partition the new card (loosing that mysterious 1GB, I wanted to add 14GB FAT32 and 1 GB EXT3), but before, I have tried this with the old (original) SD card:
I booted from CD into Ubuntu 11.0 and inserted the SD card. Strange enough, using a regular card reader the EXT3 partition was not reported, but by mounting the phone from recovery it was there. I was not able to read the contents, but gparted was aware of both partitions. Then I have resized the EXT3 partition by 1 KB (!!!) because I thought that refreshing the partition table may help the phone to recognize the card correctly.
This was a very good idea as the original SD card was now recognized during boot and the boot loop was over. I have switched the SIM cards more than a dozen times now, but it still works fine.
Also, on the FAT32 partition, somehow there was a folder with an endless chain of empty subfolders (all named "./"). In Windows, the OS could not drill down to the end ("path too long" error), neither Linx it was possible to check if there is something useful in there. On the phone, when I have started the program Disk Usage, it has reported "filesystem is damaged" because of this folder structure. I have deleted it at the DOS prompt in Windows (command rm).
Bottom line is that my EXT3 partition was somehow injured. I could not really find an explanation for that, perhaps the battery was removed during a write operation (during the boot loop?!). Anyway, it is working as smooth as it used to before. I think I have to make backups more often
Thanks for reading
