THIS IS STRICTLY A PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK KIND OF POST. IT’S MEANT PURELY FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES AND OF COURSE, I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT HAPPENS TO YOU OR YOUR PHONE AS A RESULT OF ATTEMPTING ANYTHING YOU READ IN THIS POST OR ANYWHERE ELSE ON THIS BLOG. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED, NOW PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Was up all! I have been playing around with rooting my Android phone and installing a custom ROM for quite a while now. In the beginning it was quite intimidating but I feel like I have come a long way, learned a lot, made some observations and have now gotten to a point where I’m quite comfortable throwing commands at this thing. It all started a few months ago, I spent the required 5 hours or so doing my homework, reading forums, considering my options and deciding if the mod was worth the effort. Here is why I initially decided to do it.
- The thought of running a Hero ROM (Pretty but ya, don’t bother
as performance is horrible)
- I wanted to tether my phone to my MacBook so that I could take advantage of that 6 gig data plan.
- I wanted to play with apps like “Market Enabler” and maybe some system over clocker.
- Move installed apps to the SD card to save on system space. (Actually not doing this yet, just the custom ROM alone gave me a 4x boost on available space)
- Overall performance enhancements. Seriously, I love this OS but man can it be laggy at times, the custom ROM is nice and snappy.
- Multi Touch in the browser is cool I guess but was not really a reason for me.
- Geek factor involved. So I could talk about the mods with friends at work
So let me take a second to say that yes, the countless hours spent flashing, some of them spent wondering if my beloved phone will ever work again, all of it, was 100% worth it! Every painful second! The phone nice and snappy now and there was like 80 megs free out of the gate! The tethering alone makes this all worth it for me. The difference in the phone from then to now is simply amazing!
I’m think I’m going to try and break this up into 3 steps, Backing up your phone’s current state (seriously, don’t skip this step), rooting the phone and finally installing the custom ROM. I’m not going to write a guide here, that’s already been done so I honestly don’t see the point. What I want to do is write down my observations and maybe a tip or two, things that may not be so clear in the guides I will link you to. Read this post first from start to finish and you should have all the background and info you need to run a successful mod.
So first off, a little bit about the phone. A lot of again this is based only on my opinion and observation and may not be 100% true, take it with a grain of salt and if I have something totally wrong please do leave a comment and I’ll correct it.
The phone’s memory seems to be split into the following different partitions.
- recovery (code for recovery mode that will be used in the rooting process)
- radio (Used by the phone’s radio)
- boot (the boot partition, pretty self explanatory)
- system (the system software)
- userdata (your data, installed apps etc)
- cache (note sure how important this is but I’m assuming it holds the phone’s cache)
The phone has the two following special boot modes that you will use while modding it.
- Recovery mode (start the phone while holding the home button, this is used to create your nandroid backups and to flash zip packages to the phone).
- fastboot mode (start the phone while holding the camera button, this mode is used to issue commands to the phone from a computer). Fastboot requires that the android SDK usb driver be installed on your PC, you can get that here and simply point the found new driver wizard at the drivers folder when you plug in your phone.
The files you will be using throughout this process will be either image (img) files or they will be zip files. The image files (img) are pushed to the phone via PC with the phone in fastboot mode and the zip files are placed in the root of you SD card, renamed to update.zip and flashed to the phone while in recovery mode.
The modding process will basically go as follows…
- *1st guide* Flash a custom recovery image onto the phone.
- *not in guide but do it!* Boot into recovery mode and create a nandroid backup (this is not in the guides I link to but trust me, do it!)
- *not in guide but do it!* Bootup back into the phone and move the new nandroid folder from the SD card to the PC for safe keeping, if something goes wrong or if you want to revert back to the stock OS you’ll be happy you did this!
- *1st guide* Boot into recovery mode and flash a radio update to the phone .
- *2nd guide* Place a custom ROM on the root of your SD card and name it update.zip.
- *2nd guide* Boot into fastboot mode and erase all the data on the phone then flash the radio, boot and recovery images that are required for the custom ROM’s to work.
- *2nd guide* Boot into recovery mode again and flash the ROM (update.zip) file to the phone.
- After this, rebooting should boot it right into the newly installed OS.
One last quick not before we get started, this is probably going to take you at least an hour to do (if all goes well) and will probably take way longer than that if your not happy with the ROM you choose. Be patient, take your time and don’t do this when you’ve got other things going on, you’ll be fine.
Step 1 and 2: Backing up and rooting
Open this link and follow the directions listed there… The only thing I would change there is that after step 8 and just before flashing update.zip, I would make a nandroid backup of my phone (nandriod backup is just one of the selections in the recovery mode menu) then bootup the phone normally again, copy the nandroid folder from the sd card onto the PC for safe keeping and then continue with the guide. You’ll appreciate the backup if anything goes wrong or if you ever want to revert back to your phones current state.
Step 3: Flashing a custom ROM
Follow the directions at this link. Pay close attention to the part where it says to put an update.zip file in the root of your SD card, if you don’t and start the process before placing it there you will not be able to boot the phone again, you will not actually be bricked but you will be switching to an oops kind of mode where you will probably be best off recovering with your nandroid backups and starting all over again.
As for ROM’s, there are lots of places that list custom ROM’s and google is your friend here but I’ll give you one of the many I have found here.
If the fastboot commands don’t work then you probably dont have the correct usb driver installed, see the link I posted above about getting the SDK driver. Also make sure your running these commands from the SDK’s “tools” folder, that is where the “fastboot” app lives. I would copy all of the .img files in the tools folder too, you would actually have to do this to use the commands that are in the guide. If you need help with using command prompt this probably is not something you should be doing at all.
So the phone wont boot, what now… No worries, do the following to get it back.
- In guide 2, download the files that are in the “revert back to Rogers” section and place the two files “rogersradio.img” and “rogersrecovery.img” into the SDK Tools folder you have been working in.
- Place all the files that are in teh nandroid folder you created durring the first guide into the SDK Tools folder (you did do a nandroid backup right?).
- Boot the phone into fastboot mode (hold the camera button while you power on the phone)
- Type the following commands…
fastboot flash radio rogersradio.img
fastboot flash recovery rogersrecovery.img
fastboot erase system -w
fastboot flash system system.img
fastboot flash userdata data.img
fastboot flash cache cache.img
fastboot flash boot boot.img
Huh, I think I got it all. So what are you waiting for, go mod that Dream/G1 already! Once your modded install Wireless Tether, awesome app! Drop me a line if you need help setting it up or if you have any questions about the modding process.
Later all,
Ed.
So those links once again are…
Android SDK: Here
Guide 1: Here
Guide2: Here
Some ROM’s: Here
I’m totally freaking out! I got a text message from Rogers tonight saying that there was an update available to fix the 911 issue on my Magic. It went on to say that if not installed by the 24th of January that they would disable the devices data connection. The thought of that made me a little queezy so I downloaded and installed it as soon as I got home. On the first boot post install I hear a new sound coming from the phone and I look down to see a little animation of an android waving at me and thought “huh, could they have put Sense in this update”? I wait in anticipation and holy crap, It’s all Sensed out!
