[Q] Phone always boots to bootloader, which is frozen

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Whenever I turn off my phone, or reboot it, it boots into a frozen bootloader. I can't move around or power off the device. If I plug in the USB cable and use fastboot, I can boot the phone (e.g. fastboot reboot), and then it will go into the ROM i have loaded (CM 6), but the ROM has "safe mode" at the bottom left.

What in the world is going on here?

It might be one of your hard buttons getting stuck (VolumeUp or VolumeDown - the one that's calling the bootloader when combined with power button). You could adb logcat the boot, and search for the failures in the CM boot log, that might also pinpoint the guesswork.

Well, it loads into the bootloader even if I tell it to reboot via the ROM. So I am not holding down any keys.

Also, in the boot menu that it boots into, my recovery menu option is missing.

I do seem to be able to reboot directly into recovery (I am running v1.5.3)

doing a logcat when the device is in the bootloader gets me nothing as it just sits there waiting for the device.

running logcat while the thing is booting into CM shows:
/WindowManager( 127): SAFE MODE ENABLED (menu=0 s=0 dpad=0 trackball=1)

does this mean my trackball is stuck?

And while i can get into RA via the reboot to recovery option in CM, I can't actually do anything (pressing the trackball does nothing).

Yep, your trackball is stuck.