I have a very nice Vodafone v1615 mobile which runs the Windows Mobile 6 (WM6) operating system. On Saturday, I lent it to my wonderful Fiancée while she was in the shops and I had to run back to the flat to solve a crisis at work. I’d like to say that ever since then it’s been running slowly; but the truth is it was giving me grief even before that… I just noticed it more after using her sleek, shiny (but tragically pink) Samsung Tocco.

At any rate, Monday, my alarm clock signalled that the problems were coming to a head – but that was all it signalled, since it decided that playing music was beyond it. Oddly, I actually woke up just after 6:30 anyway, and was earlier to work than I’ve been in a while. During the day, the phone played up a bit, so I took another backup, and decided to see how it behaved.

Tuesday… the same problem. Despite co-operating all Monday evening, my phone was definitely not happy. It seems most unhappy when it was woken up after being in stand-by for more than a few minutes – particularly overnight, but it also threw a fit when coerced into receiving calls after being neglected for more than a few minutes. I decided that enough was enough, and a reset would be required.
However, just after I reached that decision, I discovered that my Window Sideshow Preview (there’s a new version released now) had just expired, and perhaps that was the cause. One un-install later, and my phone has the benefit of the doubt for a while…

On Wednesday – as if knowing that it was walking on very thin ice – my phone managed to play my 6:30 alarm by 6:35… sadly though, only the first chord of my 7am alarm was forthcoming. By 9am, I had decided enough was enough, and a Hard Reset would be required. I had a recent back-up, so hopefully I’d only be out for an hour or so…

Or not…

Typically, I’d misjudged. Instead of clearing all the data and rebooting with a clean install, my phone (by now generally referred to as “You useless piece of shit”) decided to sit at the WM6.1 boot screen with the message “The device is clearing the storage. Please wait” for a very long time. In fact, it hung there all day; several soft resets, hard resets, powered, un-powered… whatever I did, nothing worked.

On the plus side, less calls to answer all day.

I’d actually known this might happen. It happened last time I did a hard reset, and came back just as I was packing it up to send back to Vodafone (at about 1am). I naively assumed it had got this little tantrum out of its system by now…

Eventually, after much searching, I found someone else who’d had the same problem. He eventually solved it by re-flashing the original WM6.1 ROM from Vodafone. Sadly though, I’m running Vista x64, so I had no expectations of this working at all… Still, I downloaded the file from Vodafone, on the off chance it might work…

While I waited for the file to download, I searched a bit on performing ROM upgrades on Vista. It looked like my best bet was going to be to use a Virtual Machine running Windows XP, connect the device to that, and flash from there. I had all that ready… but decided, on the off chance, to give it a go from Vista. From what I’d read, the worst that could happen was that the device would not be detected.

It worked.

Not only that, it fixed my original problem. The phone rebooted, and worked normally. Sadly, I left my backups in work, so I’ll have to complete the restore tomorrow… but at least now I know how to get a recalcitrant phone to perform a hard reset properly.

I’m going to write up the full details of how to do this as a page on this site – hopefully, later tonight – but to be honest, it’s not needed.