Step-By-Step Instructions to install 4.08.605.2 on HTC Incredible

[novakom]

Here you go. I know these steps work because I used them to install 4.08.605.2 on both my phone and my wife's phone, which were in different states, different memory free, and had different apps installed. I am posting them (with credit) because in order to do the installation, I had to search this forum (and several others) for a number of different pieces of the puzzle. So I am consolidating them here.

THE BIG 2 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW
1. Your phone MUST have enough room to install the update
2. Your phone MUST be reset in a specific way in order to be ABLE to install the update

Let's break it down from here.

STEP 1: Getting enough room
The first thing to know is that when your phone tells you it doesn't have enough room to install the update, 1) IT IS LYING - BUT - 2) YOU CAN'T ARGUE WITH IT. YES, if you have 400MB internal storage free, it should be enough. YES, if you have 500MB internal storage free, it should DEFINITELY be enough. BUT YOUR PHONE DOES NOT CARE. How much does your phone want? 600MB internal storage, or more. Period, end of sentence. Therefore, if you want to install 4.08.605.2, you MUST make your phone think it has over 600MB of internal storage free.

Question 1: How do I know how much internal storage I have free?
Answer 1: Settings > Applications > Manage Applications, click the "Downloaded" tab. At the bottom of the screen will be a bar that says "XMB used" on the left and "YMB free" on the right. In this case, "YMB free" must be 600MB or greater.

Question 2: If I have less than 600MB free, how do I clear up that much room?
Answer 2: Several ways of doing this. First, go to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications and click the "On SD card" tab. For every app on this list, click the checkbox. This will move much of the app to the SD card, freeing up room. Second, delete any apps you don't need, or that can just be redownloaded, like the TV Guide app. If it doesn't hold local data (or you don't mind losing your angry birds scores) then just delete them, do the update, and redownload. Third, back up any videos you have taken, and delete them. Videos can get large. Photos are small relatively, but if you have a lot they can get larger, so you can look at that. Fourth, if you put music files on your phone but not on the SD card, delete them. You can move them again after you install the update. Fifth, there are apps out there (such as the app2sd app mentioned by yzf600 here (https://community.verizonwireless.com/thread/729449/) that can fully move apps to the SD card. If all of this is not enough to get you to 600+ MB free, then you have way too much stuff on your phone and I can't help you. But for 99% of you these suggestions should do it.


STEP 2: Reset your phone so that it can install the update
OK. So now you have enough room to install the update. This is where the problem of your phone not rebooting after downloading the update comes in. For most of us, our phone has downloaded the update many, many times and told us to install, but after the first time (where it told us we didn't have enough room) it won't actually reboot when you tell it to install; instead it will count down to 0 and then nothing will happen. This happened to me dozens of times until I figured out what I had to do. The details here are only really known to HTC programmers, but the bottom line is that you have to go through a reset process of the phone so that some bug that is part of the previous update is cleared out and you can install the update again. If for some reason you have never tried to install the update before, then you should be able to skip this step, assuming you have cleared enough room for the update.

Question: How do I reset the phone properly so that I can install the update?
Answer: Glad you asked. The answer is well-documented on several forums, the one I used was posted by giskard here: (Second GB Update/Patch Won't Reboot Issue - SOLVED! - Android Forums at AndroidCentral.com)
For convenience, I am reposting the process:

1. Boot into recovery
   • Press and hold Power, Choose "Restart" option
   • When screen turns off, press and hold Volume Down and Power
2. When the white HBOOT screen appears, use the volume button to move down to “RECOVERY.”
3. Press the Power button to select “RECOVERY.”
4. When the triangle and exclamation appears, hold the Volume Up and Power button at the same time.
5. Using the volume button, scroll down to “Wipe cache partition” and select it.
6. Select "Reboot system now"

Do this process. Note that on step 2, it may take a second before your phone recognizes volume button presses, but it will, and these steps work perfectly. Once you have done this process, your phone is ready to actually try the install. Yay!


STEP 3: Download and install the update
Ok, now you should 1) have enough room and 2) cleared the bug that prevented the update to install. So now we are ready to install. But you say: But wait! My phone isn't displaying that it download the update (even though it's downloaded it multiple times already), and by the time it randomly downloads it again, my phone might not have enough room! So I say: it's ok, we can force the download.

Question 1: How do we force the download?
Answer 1: This is actually far more complex than it needs to be. First, credit where credit is due, VZWRocks posted 3 methods to force your phone to download the update here:
For those who want the second GB update/patch - Android Forums at AndroidCentral.com
However, the only one you will need is #3, changing the date. Also, as written, the steps provided in that post for changing the date did not work for my phone or my wife's phone, so I needed to dig up the suggestion provided by rickmktg here:
https://community.verizonwireless.com/thread/729449/
to come up with a set of steps that are guaranteed to work. So here are the (modified) steps you need to force the download:

1. Turn on WIFI and connect to a reliable WIFI connection (not specifically required, but WAY easier and faster)
2. Settings > Date and Time
3. Un-check Automatic to prevent the date and time from automatically updating
4. Change the date to *THREE MONTHS* from today (under Set Date) (if you do 1 year, the phone automatically rejects it)
5. Go back to the main Settings menu and select About Phone > System updates *AND OBSERVE THAT THE PHONE IS LYING TO YOU THAT IT IS FULLY UP TO DATE*. (it always does this the first time)
6. Hit the back button, then go back into System updates and observe that the update is being downloaded (if this does not happen, make sure you did steps 3 and 4 correctly, and then keep going into System updates and backing out until it downloads the update)
7. *PLUG IN YOUR PHONE*. If your phone is not at (roughly) 80% or greater battery, it will tell you that it cannot install the update after downloading it. It may also abort a successful install if the battery falls under 80% during the install, so just plug it in now.
8. Upon successfully downloading the update, select install. If you performed the reset of the phone (STEP 2 above) correctly, then the phone WILL reboot after counting down. Congratulations! The update should now automatically install.

Question 2: How do I know if the update goes through?
Answer 2: Well, ultimately, the phone should end up at the home screen and give you a little "Congratulations! You have installed 4.08.605.2" dialog box (or something similar). However, the key thing to watch out for is that after the initial reboot from step 8 above, the phone will go through a phase with a hard drive symbol on the screen and a green status bar slowly filling beneath it. If the green bar completely fills, then most likely the update will be successful (there is a whole lot more installing to be done - like 5 minutes or so on the droid eye screen - but at this point you should be good). However, if the green status bar does NOT fill - if the phone reboots when the green status bar is 1/3rd full or so-then that means you probably need to clear yet more room on your phone. Delete a few more apps. Again, 600+ is required. I'm pretty sure that I did it with 625MB free or so, so if 600 doesn't work get up to 625 and try again. And again, as far as I know, if the green status bar fills on that initial screen, then you should be good, and you should get the "congratulations!" message when it gets back to the home screen.

Question 3: I'm leery about installing the update because I'm worried about losing data on my phone. What did you lose, if anything?
Answer 3: I lost no apps, I lost no app data, I lost no music files (well, they were on my sd card so that shouldn't be a problem). What I did lose are music playlists (through the default music player) and a few default settings (like the alert tone for when I receive a text message). So ultimately no big deal.

Best of luck to you, hope this is useful for people, and if I stole your ideas I do apologize, I did my best to give credit where I took ideas from others. Everything that is not cited are steps or ideas that I came up with after 4 hours of fighting with this stupid thing.

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[samstein]

Finally did the trick!

I don't even care about what difference (if any) there might be in user experience between 4.06... and 4.08..., but spending two months constantly getting the Update Available notification only to have it always fail was pretty frustrating.

I had basically tried everything in this post previously including the reset process without any luck, but I think the key was getting the internal storage available over 600MB. That was the one thing I was missing. Until now, I had simply tried dumping all my app caches and data. But actually uninstalling a handful of apps (temporarily, anyway) this time seemed to have made the difference.

Thanks

[happybear]

I just registered to say thank you. It was nice to have all of this information in one place, along with troubleshooting ideas. This worked perfectly. I appreciate you taking the time to compile and post this!

[tuxedo]

I say thanks to you as well!

[TheSauce]

Thank you very much for this. As a note, I had to keep deleting apps until I had 683MB free. I tried the update at 624MB, 652MB, and 675MB and all three of them failed saying there wasn't enough space. I was nearly out of apps to install so I'm glad it worked.

Thanks again,
Sauce

[lucky816]

Thanks a ton!! Was so annoyed by the system update message that never did anything!

[dickgtax]

I just successfully installed the 4.08.605.2 update. Thanks for your great instructions. At first I couldn't get more than 609 MB free
putting everything I could on the SD card and uninstalling almost everything that could be uninstalled. I couldn't get the update to
install.
In desperation I decided to try deleting all the updates I could find in MAPS, ADOBE FLASHPLAYER, and several others.
Viola! I picked up another 30MB of internal storage, and got the update to load.

One question: Is my phone any better now, and if so, how?

[novakom]

To answer the last question, there are two main things that this helps:

1. The annoying "low disk space" error goes away
2. There is a bug in the previous OS version which screws up some data services (most notably MS Exchange services, like those supported by the Touchdown app) when you turn off 3G networking. If you don't use Exchange services this may not affect you.

I should also note that after doing the update, I did find that sometimes my gmail would refuse to automatically sync (i.e. I would have to manually go into gmail and hit refresh to get my email). This is which automatic syncs on. So the phone still has issues, but the big one the update solves is the #1 above. If you are like me and cannot stand bogus errors that won't go away, it's totally worth it. As for new features, I don't think there really are any. You can check the verizon site with the update list for more details.

[hoohaah]

After performing the 4.08.605.2 update per your awesome instructions, my HTC Sense constantly crashes. The update did work, but the frequency of crashing is so much I can't get into the phone to do anything else. I did battery pull, reboot, etc. to no avail. What do you suggest?

[scoobydad]

Thanks, novacom. That's been bugging us for months. Wiped cache, moved stuff and date change.