How to return your HTC EVO 3D with 1.50 HBOOT S-ON to stock unrooted condition
There comes a time in every HTC EVO 3D root user’s life when they need to return to a stock unrooted state for some reason or another. These reasons may include taking the phone back to Sprint for repair, selling it to someone who does not want a rooted phone, or simply updating the radio firmware, which cannot be done on a rooted/unlocked S-ON recovery.
While we have previously covered returning to stock from Revolutionary’s root method, should you have been saddled with HBOOT 1.50 and the HTCDev unlock method, your return-to stock method is different.
Before you proceed, if you’re planning on keeping any data on the phone or SD card, make sure to make a Nandroid backup (you’ll lose everything on the phone) and then copy the entire contents of the SD card to a computer. The unrooting process should destroy all data on the phone (same as the HTCDev unlocking process does).
Update: You may want to check out a rather new post on mostly-automatic stock restoration we did a year later than this article. It’s quite a bit simpler.
You will need two files: rooteveo3dnew.zip (which you can skip downloading if you have the Android SDK), and whatever the latest RUU for your phone is, which you can find in this xda thread or here.
If you can’t reasonably grab a download from those links, copy the file name (e.g., “RUU_Shooter_S_Sprint_WWE_2.17.651.5_…”), and search for it at goo-inside.me, which is a free Android file hosting site. Make sure you’re downloading the RUU for your particular phone’s carrier, as flashing a Sprint phone with Rogers firmware might break it.
WARNING: Anything below this paragraph could screw your phone up.
It will erase (probably all) data on your phone and SD card. I encourage you to double-check anything stated below with other sites, sources, or random people you know for accuracy. Due to how your phone was rooted, run, shipped, built, or looked at, it may not work properly with the following. What works for me may kill puppies in China for all I know, and there’s always a chance of a corrupted download, bad phone, rabies, and snafus.
Now plug in your EVO 3D and get ready to lose all data on it.
Step 1: Lock the bootloader
When you used the HTCDev method to unlock your EVO, all you did was unlock the bootloader. In order to flash radios again, you’ll need it relocked.
From the file rootevo3dnew.zip (or from the Android SDK), there’s a program called Fastboot.exe. Open a command prompt, navigate to that folder, and type fastboot oem lock.
If you’ve got the Android SDK, the path for that is either android-sdktoolsfastboot.exe or program filesandroid-adktoolsfastboot.exe. And I’m not sure if it’s just my install or a universal issue, but if you get an error claiming a DLL is missing, change the directory to android-sdkplatform-tools and run fastboot from there via ..toolsfastboot oem lock.
Step 2: Install the RUU
Run the RUU you downloaded.
You’ll have a couple of pages to agree to and read (make sure phone is charged 30% or higher; make sure power saving is not on the computer you’re doing this from, as a computer going to sleep could leave a dead phone in its wake; all data on phone will be wiped, etc.).
During the RUU installation, the phone may reboot a few times as the HBOOT, radios, recovery, kernel, and ROM are replaced.
Expect this to take about 12 minutes, so walk away.
Step 3: Drink refreshing lemonade
You should now be re-locked, stock, and unrooted. Should you wish to return to the root world later, just follow the same steps you used to root it the first time or check out our guide.
