Originally Posted by compunerd3<br />
Before I flashed i wiped and booted it but it got stuck again and thats why I went back to the recovery to re flash<br />
Its getting late here gotta get some sleep, ill try some more tommorrow, <br />
thanks for your help so far quiqsilver<br />
Does this mean I have to send it back to SONY?
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It sometimes gets stuck in a bootloop when downgrading to HC from ICS. The solution to that is a factory reset after the flash completes, which you did. I'm not sure what the issue is there.<br />
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The problem at this point is that your system seems to have flipped back to trying to boot the partition with ICS. Strangely, though, recovery is checking the build number of the HC partition when deciding whether to accept an update. (This is likely a bug in recovery. It should check the new version against the "active" version, i.e., the version it's trying to boot, but instead it's checking against the newer, but now "inactive" partition.) The version you're trying to flash is the same version on the HC partition, so it's rejecting it. To open a shell, we need recovery to accept the "hacked_recovery" files, but it will not because they are lower versions than the one it's checking against.<br />
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It's likely that the only option at this point is to flash the official ICS update (without root). If you want root, you could send it to Sony and hope it comes back with HC (you could probably request this). It's also possible that the bootloader will flip back to trying to boot HC after more attempts at factory resets and boot attempts -- the bootloader's decision on which partition to boot to seems a bit quirky at times -- or that recovery will fix itself and start checking the proper partition before updating. If you can get into recovery while the bootloader is flipped back to trying to boot the HC partition (if it ever does), a factory reset might solve the problem.