so ends up the EMMC chip has bad sectors and this is a problem with this phone. I ended up on freenode at #htc-holiday and had a good chat with IOMonster, so I will try to return the phone to HTC 866.449.8358 and if not I will do the following.

by the way fastboot boot recovery-beta2.img did get me into recovery -- strange no one pointed that out to me...

Here is how I found out the EMMC ship has write errors.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>fastboot erase cache
erasing 'cache'...
OKAY [ 0.197s]
finished. total time: 0.199s

C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>fastboot oem rebootRUU

...
(bootloader) Start Verify: 3
(bootloader) Start Verify: 3
(bootloader) erase sector 130560 ~ 131071 (512)
(bootloader) [SD/EMMC]Error status=0x400008
(bootloader) DATA_TIMEOUT
(bootloader) SD: write failed in CMD25.
(bootloader) emmc_erase(1852): sd_write_sector failed!
OKAY [ 1.184s]
finished. total time: 1.186s

C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\platform-tools>fastboot flash zip c:\
junk\zom.zip
sending 'zip' (420878 KB)...
OKAY [ 39.172s]
writing 'zip'...
(bootloader) adopting the signature contained in this image...
(bootloader) zip header checking...
(bootloader) zip info parsing...
FAILED (remote: 99 unknown fail)
finished. total time: 40.786s


I will try to remember to come back and post what happens when I call HTC tomorrow.

I had a similar thing with my ACER C6, get a copy of sysinternals process explorer if you're on windows, run the RUU/EUU and watch what is running and when phone goes into fastboot, once you know what PC program is doing this rerun the whole thing, once the phone shuts down pause/suspend the EUU/RUU then flash in your hboot, disconnect the phone, it'll either reboot as is or run the EUU/RUU again to the end, that's how I put mine in your position now by the sounds of it and this is how I reversed it.
Hope it helps

Rooted Xakep E320/C6 EUU Hacked Update

@Antagonist42

I think you missed the following at the beginning of my last post. Or perhaps you posted before I posted.

Below is the problem, there is no fix. It just gets worse

>>>so ends up the EMMC chip has bad sectors and this is a problem with this phone. I ended up on freenode at #htc-holiday and had a good chat with IOMonster, so I will try to return the phone to HTC 866.449.8358 and if not I will do the following.

I was thinking if it's second hand and been badly flashed it could simply be hboot not passing security and only way I got around was using EUU and interrupting to flash hboot back to original but if there's no writing a hboot in then fair enough

Rooted Xakep E320/C6 EUU Hacked Update