G1 wont boot -- bricked?

[turboraketti]

Android doesn't want to boot on my G1 any more. Does someone know what's wrong? This is the story:

Short version:
- Incoming call when I insert new SD; Android goes syrup (unusable), reboot or safe-mode doesn't help.
- Trying to start bootloader; wont start. After this, phone wont boot at all. The only thing that happens when booting is a white line on the display that disappears quickly. No response to keypressing.

Detailed version:
I got me a new SD card for my phone (8GB). At the very same moment as I inserted it into the phone, the phone started ringing (incoming call). I rejected the call and after that Android went syrup. Every display touch took several seconds to be registered and the system was quite unusable, so I rebooted the phone. It took quite a while to boot and when started it was as slow as before the reboot. I switched off the phone and took out the battery for a while and booted again -- same result. After a while I managed to enter my SIM code via the keyboard, but I also use an unlock pattern and I couldn't draw it since the screen saver went on before my display touch was recognised by the system.

I tried boot into safe mode (Menu+Power), but had the same issues there. Then I thought I could try the bootloader (Camera+Power, hadn't done that before) and perhaps I could boot a minimal system from an image on the SD and then remove stuff from the system disk if it's full, but the bootloader wouldn't start. After that, I couldn't even boot normally any more. The only thing that happens when I try to boot is that the backlight goes on and a vertical line of white pixels fades in and then out again, sometimes twice and sometimes prefixed with a short vibrator buzz (like when booting normally). After that; nothing, no response to pressed keys. To start over I have to pull the battery.

Does anybody know what this is about? Any ideas/hints? I want my android back...

[gbk1]

So you're not rooted.
The problem happened with the new SD card?

Have you tried recovery mode? Home + Power? Seems like that should have been the first thing for you to try.

[crazynorwegian]

have you tried reformatting the sd car (fat32) and starting from scratch. now might be a good time to research root. btw I think it is impossible to brick this phone its just lazy people who dont want to do enough research on how to fix/root there phone. This phone is no different from a regular pc, and its very hard to brick a pc unless its hardware related.

[turboraketti]

So you're not rooted.

No, I'm not. I thought about getting rooted since I bought it, but never quite got there. I've looked into it lately though.

The problem happened with the new SD card?

It happened when I inserted a mint 8GB SD that I was about to buy. I switched back to my original SD when trouble began.

Have you tried recovery mode? Home + Power? Seems like that should have been the first thing for you to try.

The first thing I tried was normal reboot. The second was Safe mode and third Recovery mode. Recovery mode succeeded the first time -- I got that exclamation mark on the display -- but I couldn't invoke the menu that is supposed to show if you press alt+L. Subsequent attempts to boot into Recovery mode (or any other mode) fail. The only thing that happens is that flickering white stripe on the display described in my initial post. Same thing with Normal boot, Safe mode, and Bootloader.

[turboraketti]

have you tried reformatting the sd car (fat32) and starting from scratch.

I don't have the SD that "caused" the problem, since I tried it in the store and when it didn't work I didn't buy it. However, I have tried with my original SD and without any SD at all.

now might be a good time to research root.

Agree, and I've looked into it. But now it seems I can't even start the bootloader and hence I don't know how to proceed in the rooting process. Any hints are more than welcome.

btw I think it is impossible to brick this phone its just lazy people who dont want to do enough research on how to fix/root there phone. This phone is no different from a regular pc, and its very hard to brick a pc unless its hardware related.

I'm happy to hear that you believe G1 is unbrickable. I don't consider myself lazy, though, and I'm in the middle of the researching right now, which include asking for help on forums. I'm well aware of the hardware nature of the G1 and if the phone is brick I can probably open it up, find a JTAG interface and flash a new system, if I can determine the chipset and can get a proper disk image, but I'd like to avoid that if it's possible to solve the problem in another way. If the system disk breaks on a PC I would probably configure BIOS, boot from a CD, mount the system disk and try to recover the files I want before reinstalling the system. How can I do the corresponding thing on a G1? Again, any hints are more than welcome.