With the release of a MR2 ROM by Verizon Wireless for the Touch Pro 2, came excitement about something new. However this quickly turned into frustration by users who shortly realized that the ROM failed to boot. See Mr. X’s diagnosis and fix inside.
After Reading the forums at https://www.ppcgeeks.com it didn’t take users long to realize that the HSPL was the cause of the ROMs hang, or was it the ROM its self? Well its both. Users soon figured out that if you flash back to a stock bootloader the MR2 update would boot no issues. Then shortly after this another user Nightraven from PPCGeeks decided to do what any chef would do in a no boot situation and start digging into the xip and the drivers associated with booting the OS. he or She discovered that one of the OEM XIP Kernel drivers was to blame, specifically OEM_FLASHDRV_1.DLL. Removing this and while you’re at it you may as well remove OEM_FLASHDRV.DLL and also edit them and any reference to an extended rom out of the boot registry, will in fact allow you to recook and boot the ROM successfully.
Is this all just a sad coincidence that many users have to relock to flash this rom, is it poor rom building on HTC/Verizon’s part? Was this intentional? No one is really sure. It’s up for dispute as no one has any facts to be honest.
Now here is my take on this, my diagnosis of the issue if you want to call it that. Now part of this is based on an educated guess as I’m not a SPL expert. OEM_FLASHDRV.DLL and OEM_FLASHDRV_1.DLL appear to be drivers for an extended ROM. I’m not sure why they are included because they are not needed by the device at all to function properly nor are any of the carriers appearing to deploy and use an extended ROM partition for their software customizations. No chefs that I know of are taking advantage of the EXT partition “proses” and this makes these drivers and there reference to boot up with the XIP/Kernel and launch useless. Now my speculation is that for some reason when the OS boots its halting and most likely has something to do with the driver and looking if an EXT ROM exists. My theory is that for some reason the HSPL causes this proses to malfunction causing a no boot situation. This is the first time I’ve personally seen a OS have issues booting from a HSPL flashed device so your guess is as good as mine if this is even the right theory, but its a pretty good guess as to whats gumming up the works.
There was enough users on the forums reporting issues that I took it upon my self to dump the ROM, clean out the xip of the above DLL files, removed all EXT ROM reference, made it tethering safe, added in a HTC task manager, Added in Wifi Router, replaced the D3D driver with a better preforming one and put in a driver patch that will stop the SOD (sleep of death) from occurring. Basically i made this ROM the way it SHOULD have been shipped out.
The last two sense 2.5 updates pushed out by HTC for the Touch Pro 2 seemed to be a mess in some way, the Sprint MR1 is a mess, even the device name in active sync partinership in the Sprint MR1 has a damn typo in it. Looks like some one is dropping the ball these days.
As promised above here is the FIXED version of the Verizon Wireless MR2 Touch Pro 2 Rom Upgrade.