It Doesn't Get Scarier Than This

So this month's topic is scary Windows Mobile problems and mine's actually pretty similar to Nate's in that it's ROM related. But that's where the similarity ends. Mine was caused because I was loading custom ROMS onto my device (an ETEN Glofiish X500) more often than I changed underwear (and I do change often). That was a recipe for disaster (custom ROM loading that is, what were you thinking?) and it wasn't long before my device conked out.

What happened was that I flashed my device with a ROM that was meant for another device. Not the wisest of things to do but there were so many ROMs that I actually lost track of which one should have gone where. So long story short, my device thought it was another model so it won't boot up (because the hardware was different) and when I tried to flash another ROM, it would not accept it because it said the ROM was not of the right version (oh now it decides to tell me).

One option was I could send it back to Taiwan but after hearing so much horror stories about ETEN support, I didn't really want to risk it. I thought that was the end of it and that I had to get a new device (the last resort, universal solution to just about fixing any problem). Fortunately, I stumbled upon a forum posting of many other unfortunate users who faced the problems as I did. AND THEY HAD A SOLUTION!

Only problem, I had to use a Hex Editor, something which I am not even familiar with. So I was rather wary whether I should proceed with it but considering I had nothing else to lose, I figured out, why not. I just had to change some values within the ROM and reload it and voila, my device was back to life. That also signaled the end of my careless flashing days :P Thank god.

For those curious about how I fixed my device, I have actually laid out the steps with screen shots over my old site, Eten Blog dot Com. You can find the step by step solution here. It's only for Eten devices though!