Installing a Custom Rom: Zen Aria Alpha 5

Now that we know how to use Nandroid to make backups and run system restores, it's time to take a look at installing a custom ROM.
What is a custom ROM? The best way to think of a custom ROM is to think of it as a new operating system for your android phone. Some are faster than others. Some offer more features that others. But for the most part, all of the custom ROM's out there in the development community are superior to the stock ROM that came loaded on your HTC Hero for Sprint.

So, what we want to do is load a custom ROM.

The first step in loading a custom ROM is choosing the ROM you want to load. For this tutorial, we are going to use the Zen Aria ROM.
Step 1: download the ROM. The Zen Aria ROM that we'll be using in this tutorial is available here.

Step 2: place the ROM in on your phone's sdcard in the root directory (that's the main folder [i.e. not inside some other folder]).

Step 3: boot into Nandroid using your method of choice and make a backup of your currant system. Once your backup is complete, move on to Step 4.

Step 4: for most ROMs, at this point you will want to WIPE your phone by selecting - Wipe data/factory reset, however the Zen-Aria ROM that we are installing will go ahead and do this for us during install, so we can just skip this step and move right along to Step 5.
Step 5: once your backup is finished, select - Apply sdcard:choose zip from the Nandroid menu.

You will get a list of the ROM's that are on your sdcard.

Step 6: select Zen-Aria_Alpha5-D-signed.zip

You will be prompted to install this ROM and you should accept the prompt using the HOME key.

The ROM will self install from this point and will then land you, once again in the Nandroid main menu.
Step 7: select - Reboot system now

The first system reboot on the Zen Aria ROM is painfully slow. It can take up to 10 min for it to complete. Just wait it out. It may appear to be hung on the HTC screen; never fear, it will move along and finish up beautifully.

Quick Review of Zen Aria.


This ROM is incredibly fast. If you are mirgrating to it from a stock HTC Hero for Sprint, you will be shocked by how smooth this ROM is. There is virtually no sluggishness. As you can see, it is build on the Sense UI which I was a little worried about at first (not being a big fan of sense) but I prefer the styling on this quite a bit and, again, it's way zippier than the stock sense UI. I just installed it on my phone 30min ago, so I'm not sure how hard it is on the battery. I know that it overclocks the phone's CPU slightly so that might have some kind of effect, though, from what I can tell, the development community is absolutely swooning over this build. I'm looking forward to running this for a few days at least and may make a more permanent switch.

Bottom Line: Even with the Sense UI, this ROM is a Ferrari and stable enough for everyday use.

UPDATE (Sept. 3, 2010): The one drawback that I've noticed with this ROM is that on restart, the HTC screen will really hang for a long time. Sometimes it hangs for up to half an hour which is, in my opinion, unacceptable. I'm sure this will be fixed in the next update. I'm told that the hang time is due to sense UI having difficulty loading.

Making a Nandroid Backup

Now that our phones are rooted and we have Nandroid available on our phone, we should probably think about doing a backup of our current system. Making a Nandroid backup is simple but could save you when working with custom ROMs.

First, we'll need to enter the Nandroid interface and there are 2 ways to do this.

Option 1: from the command line.

Step 1: plug your phone into your computer using a USB cable and set the phone to "Charge Only". Also, make sure that you have USB debugging active (Home-> Menu-> Settings-> Applications -> Development-> USB debugging).

Step 2: open a command prompt on your computer and change directories to your android SDK tools folder: cd C:\...\android-sdk-windows\tools
and hit Enter

Step 3: launch the shell: adb shell
and hit Enter

NOTE: At this point your command prompt might display:

adb server is out of date. killing...
*daemon started successfully*
#

If it does, skip to Step 5. Otherwise, move on to Step 4

Step 4: switch to root users: su
and hit Enter

You should see a # at this point

Step 5: now we want to boot our phone into the Nandroid interface. From the command line enter the following command: reboot restore
and hit Enter

At this point your phone should begin to reboot and you will land in the Nandroid interface.

Option 2: manual landing.

Step 1: power off your phone.

Step 2: while holding the "volume down" key, press the power button.

Step 3: The phone should boot up to the HTC screen and then jump to a menu. One of the options in this menu is "Restore" and it tells you that you can select this option by pressing the "Home" key. Press your phone's home key and you will boot into the Nandroid system.
Restore

Making a Nandroid backup

If you have Build: RA-heroc-v1.2.3 (which you should if you followed my "Backups and Recoveries Using Nandroid" post) then your Nandroid menu will look like this:

- Reboot system now
- Nandroid v2.2 backup
- Nandroid v2.2 restore
- Apply sdcard:update.zip
- Apply sdcard:choose zip
- Wipe data/factory reset
- Wipe SD:ext partition
- Wipe SD:dalvik-cache
- Part SD:fat32+ext2+swap
- Part SD:only fat32
- Repair ext filesystem
- Convert ext2 to ext3
- Fix apk uid mismatches
- Fix rotate
- USB Mass storage on
- USB Mass storage off

To make a back up of your phone's current state (which I highly recommend you do), use your trackball to navigate down 1 position to "Nandroid v2.2 backup" and click it with your trackball.

The phone should prompt you as follows:

Create Nandroid backup?
Press HOME to confirm,
any other key to abort.

Press your HOME key and your phone will make a backup of its current state and then drop you back at the Nandroid menu. Once you are there, just click Reboot system now to reboot into your phone as phone.

Now you have a back up of your phone's current state (or its state at the time of backup).

If you need to restore your phone to the state in which it existed at the time of backup, just re-enter the Nandroid interface and select -Nandroid v2.2 restore.

You will be prompted to confirm that you wish to restore the phone to the most recent backup. When you confirm this, your phone will revert and you will be back where you were when you made your last backup.

Now we know how to make backups and do system restores using Nandroid.

Backups and Recoveries: Using Nandroid

Because we rooted our HTC Hero for Sprint using the unrevoked method, we still have not made it possible to use Nandroid to make backups, run recoveries, and install custom ROMs. If you want to run a custom ROM, you'll need to be able to use Nandroid and so, you'll want to read through this post.

Please Note: If you haven't rooted your HTC Hero for Sprint yet, you'll want to read my Rooting Option 1 post. The following is only possible with a rooted phone.

So, we want to be able to use Nandroid. Nandroid is something like a BIOS and you'll need it to change boot settings, wipe your device, load ROMs, do backups, restores, etc.

How to's:

Step 1: Plug your rooted HTC Hero for Sprint into the computer that you put the Android SDK on and set it to "Disc Drive" (Don't have the android SDK? Read my "What You'll Need" post to get it.) Make sure you turn USB Debugging ON (on your phone: Home-> Menu-> Settings-> Applications-> Development-> USB debugging.)

Step 2: Download the android recovery-RA-heroc image here and save it to your phone's sim card at the root directory. In other words, save it to the sim card but don't put it in any folders. It should be in the main directory along with all your other folders.

Now we're really going to start hacking at your phone. Remember that you are doing this at your own risk.

All computer command line calls will be in blue, bold, and italics.

Step 3: On you computer, launch your command prompt (terminal for linux users and I don't really care what it is for apple people). If you don't know how to launch a command prompt, just go to the "start button" and run "cmd" (for XP users) or just type "cmd" in the search field for Vista/Win 7 users.

Step 4: Now we want to change directories so that we are hanging around our Android SDK tools. In your command prompt type: cd C:\...\android-sdk-windows\tools
and hit "Enter". The "..." is whatever path leads to your android sdk folder. If this is new to you or you don't understand this, I highly recommend you stop now and enjoy your rooted phone as it is.

Your command prompt should now read: C:\...\android-sdk-windows\tools>_

Step 5: We now want to launch some shell code but first we want to confirm that our SDK tools see your phone. In your command prompt, type: adb devices
and hit Enter
You should see a List of attached devices and your device's serial number.

Step 6: We launch our shell: adb shell
and hit Enter

You should now see a $ and a cursor

Step 7: We switch to root user: su
and hit Enter

You should now see a # and a cursor. Note: if you don't see a #, look at your phone and see if it is prompting you to give any permissions. If it is, allow.

Step 8: Now we want to flash the recovery image that we put on the sdcard back in Step 2. To do this, we're going to envoke some root power after we hop onto our phone's microSD care: cd sdcard
and hit Enter

You should now see a #

Step 9: A good way to make sure that we are in the right place is to list the directories and files where we are. We'll do that my calling for a list: ls
and hit Enter

Command Prompt should list the local directories and files for the sdcard root folder. You should see "recovery-RA-heroc-v1.2.3.img" among them. If not, go back to Step 2 and be sure that you've placed this image on your phone's sdcard.

Step 10: We are now going to flash this recovery image in order to create our Nandroid directory: flash_recovery recovery-RA-heroc-v1.2.3.img
and hit Enter

Nothing too exciting will happen. Command prompt might return this call in text form and then should just leave you again with a # awaiting your next command.

Step 11: Now, we will are going to visit our newly created nandroid folder by forcing our phone to boot into it: reboot recovery
and hit Enter

Your phone will reboot into the nandroid interface. From here you will be able to make backups of your phone, restore your phone from these backups, wipe system data and, most importantly, install custom ROMs. I will cover all of this in a later post.

If any of this didn't work, please let me know in the comments field or, if you know me, let me on Facebook or something.