[Q] Desire HD needs SD Card reboot - Which ROM? topic

Up until yesterday I had a great little HTC Desire HD, A9191 with rooted gingerbread 2.3.5, an unlocked bootloader (from htcdev), S-ON - and everything in my garden was rosy... Then I tried to get too clever and pushed a new hosts file to /system/etc while I had su privileges.

This was a big file (540K) which I had been using quite happily on Windows to keep adware at bay. However, I now think it caused the phone to fail because the first time I tried to boot up after the push, it started looping round the boot sequence indefinitely. I am wondering if the IP for localhost, being 127.0.0.1, is incompatible with linux...? Anyway, that's a job for tomorrow because before I can think about draining the swamp there are some "alligators" to deal with...

While this continuous re-booting was going on I found I could still do "adb shell" and run "su" but all my attempts to restore hosts to the original file were futile because at this point the file system was "read-only" even for root. Then I made my biggest error which was to attempt "RECOVERY" from the boot menu...... ( I think my previous attempt to create a recovery file failed and I must have just forgotten to attend to it.)

The boot loader still responds and I am now looking at the boot screen which says:

=============================================
*** UNLOCKED ***
ACE PVT SHIP S-ON RL
HBOOT-2.00.0029
MICROP-0438
RADIO-26.14.04.28_M (this is the original factory-shipped version for my phone)
eMMC-boot
Dec 22 2011, 14:28:19

HBOOT

<VOL UP> to previous item
<VOL DOWN> to next item
<POWER> to select item

FASTBOOT
RECOVERY
FACTORY RESET
SIMLOCK
IMAGE CRC

==============================================
Here's what happens with these various options:

1. Normal boot ends with "Sorry! Process system is not responding" and two buttons "Force close" and "Wait" - but in reality the phone is simply hung...
2. FASTBOOT ends with a phone gif and a red triangle / exclamation mark.
3. RECOVERY also ends with a phone gif and a red triangle / exclamation mark.
4. FACTORY RESET runs a black/white barber pole and sd card symbol for 2 minutes, then reboots as far as "quietly brilliant" but this then ends up the same as 1. above.

5. SIMLOCK produces this output:
FAT32 init OK
Open MCCMNC file fail
Open CID file fail
Process done, reboot device?
<VOL UP> Yes

6. IMAGE CRC produces this output:
osbl: 0x3AA5FD29
amss: 0xD791CCA8
hboot: 0xFB10D632
boot: 0x8446CCFD
recovery: 0x0x88F60913
system: 0x898C2200

When I put an sd card in the slot and press and hold the power button with HBOOT highlighted it produces this:

SD checking...
Loading...[PD98DIAG.zip]
No image!
Loading...[PD98DIAG.nbh]
No image or wrong image!
Loading...[PD98IMG.zip]
No image!
Loading...[PD98IMG.nbh
No image or wrong image!

So am I right in thinking that it's not quite dead yet and still recoverable? I have made a few attempts to position ROM files in the root of the sd card, but so far without success.

Could someone please tell me (assuming it's not bricked yet) what file(s) I need to put on the sd card to stand any chance of recovering. Previously I had downloaded the nearest "stock rom" to the phone's original but this came as a .exe which just compounded my confusion as to what needs to be done.

Here's hoping...

Happy New Year to all.