Hey guys. These posts are all too common but I really am distressed here (I'm worried I bricked my phone and don't have technical skill to bring it back to life), and please, any help would be really appreciated. 
Here's the last thing that happened before I acted stupidly:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=15708254&postcount=394
long story short: tried to update to new cwm but couldn't do the step to delete a file in system/etc called install-recovery
I could not find a way to delete the file I needed to delete, install-recovery, I just gave up and thought "well, whatever. I have tenfar's older CWM on my phone anyway, and I never end up NEEDING it because everything goes fine if I follow the directions (ironic thing to think when not following directions).
So I continued following kennethpenn's guide on brief mobile, doing all steps except for #2:
Flashing went fine, until after I rebooted in the recovery menu, and.... boot loops; the M would swirl around, turn dead, come back 3 seconds later, go dead again, on and on, until I did a battery pull
One last thing that I didn't think about now but may be a huge reason for the problem: I was on 1.8.3 but deodxed and running the latest "P-ROM" Ginger Blur.
So I can get into the fastboot, stock android recovery, and like ten other options during bootup. What I want to do is just start fresh because it'll set me back a lot, but right now I just want a functional phone. So can I do a factory reset in the boot menu, or would that just permanently brick it forever considering I unlocked the boot-loader, was themed, etc etc?
Thanks - any suggestions greatly appreciated.
To all the other newbs that love this stuff, but don't really know wtf you're doing, the moral of my story is "follow the directions EXACTLY and if you're unsure that you can do that, then don't proceed.
Here's the last thing that happened before I acted stupidly:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=15708254&postcount=394
long story short: tried to update to new cwm but couldn't do the step to delete a file in system/etc called install-recovery
I could not find a way to delete the file I needed to delete, install-recovery, I just gave up and thought "well, whatever. I have tenfar's older CWM on my phone anyway, and I never end up NEEDING it because everything goes fine if I follow the directions (ironic thing to think when not following directions).
So I continued following kennethpenn's guide on brief mobile, doing all steps except for #2:
I was definitely rooted, and am pretty confident that I unlocked the bootloader, because it took me a long time but I followed all the steps and got all the right responses on the phone and it said (and still says) Unlocked in the upper left corner during bootup, and I learned a lot this morning and was feeling good...Prerequisites
Unlocked bootloader
CWM recovery
External SD card
Gingerbread zip (download above)
Backup PDS partition
Backup data and applications
Installation
1.Unlock your bootloader
2.Download CWM recovery and flash it
3.Mount your device to USB
4.Put the Gingerbread .zip file on your external SDcard
5.Click “install zip from sdcard”
6.Choose zip from sdcard
7.Pick the gingerbread .zip
8.Install it!
9.Reboot
Flashing went fine, until after I rebooted in the recovery menu, and.... boot loops; the M would swirl around, turn dead, come back 3 seconds later, go dead again, on and on, until I did a battery pull
One last thing that I didn't think about now but may be a huge reason for the problem: I was on 1.8.3 but deodxed and running the latest "P-ROM" Ginger Blur.
So I can get into the fastboot, stock android recovery, and like ten other options during bootup. What I want to do is just start fresh because it'll set me back a lot, but right now I just want a functional phone. So can I do a factory reset in the boot menu, or would that just permanently brick it forever considering I unlocked the boot-loader, was themed, etc etc?
Thanks - any suggestions greatly appreciated.
To all the other newbs that love this stuff, but don't really know wtf you're doing, the moral of my story is "follow the directions EXACTLY and if you're unsure that you can do that, then don't proceed.