Dark Liquid

I’ve been holding off upgrading the firmware on my G1 due to fears about warranties and bricking my primary communications device but my phone was acting up recently, being very, very slow on the stock firmware that I decided, what the hell, lets do it.

My good friend bytey directed me to a useful guide on rooting and flashing your phone. I went a little further than that and so I thought I’d share the process with you.

I first followed the above guide but stopped when it came time to installing a new firmware, instead just following the rooting, recovery and HardSPL instructions. Once that was done, I ran into trouble.

I decided to download and install cyanogen 4.0.4. To use the Apps2SD functionality, you need to partition your microSD card so it has a ext3 partition and a fat32, which I did using fdisk and the mkfs tools under linux. I opted to have the fat32 partition be the first on the disk, followed by the ext3 one. I’d heard that problems happened with large ext3 partitions so I made sure to keep it to 1GB or less.

The install process went along easy enough, I downloaded the firmware from the cyanogen mod site and renamed the update-blah-blah-blah.zip file to update.zip and placed it in the root of the SDcard then powered off the phone. I booted the phone into recovery mode by holding the home button and tapping the power button, did an Alt-L to show the menu, Alt-W to wipe the phone and then Alt-S to flash the rom from the update.zip.

Voila, one reboot later and I’m running cyanogen!

What happened after this resulted in me screwing up my install. I installed the cyanogen updater from the market and tried to install the enoch theme with it. When the updater tried to apply the theme the screwed everything up and I had to reinstall cyanogen.

What I should have actually done was install the cyanogen recovery image first. I did this by downloading it from the cyanogen website, opening a terminal on the phone, su-ing and then typing:

flash_image recovery /sdcard/name-of-cyanogen-recovery-image.img

After installing that the cyanogen updater worked a treat for installing the enoch theme and I was away!