If Rooting Option 1 wasn't easy enough for you, it turns out that there is an even easier method... A "One Click" method!
Things you'll need.
1) An HTC Hero for Sprint
The How to's:
Step 1: download and install this apk to your HTC Hero for Sprint
Step 2: once it has successfully installed, run the app, read the disclaimer, and confirm
Step 3: reboot your phone.
Once rebooted your phone should have Darchstar's recovery and you should be able to boot into it using the reboot recovery method of your choice.
Step 4: use the recovery interface to flash custom ROMs, make backups, restores, etc.
Step 5: go into settings, and turn usb debugging on.
The developer of this app asks that after Step 5, you go into your phone's application settings and uninstall the app that you installed in Step 1.
Showing posts with label restore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label restore. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)