Saturday, June 13, 2009

We have root!

So after installing like a gazillion apps and playing around, I decided to look at seeing if I could restore an original (non Chungwha Telecom branded) rom on this phone and I came across daldroid's posts on xda-developers.

He had some original recovery roms that could be used to get root, and it had been tested on my Taiwan sourced phone, so I thought I'd give it a go.

So I copied the files across to my sd card root, renamed the signed.zip file as update.zip and then dropped it into fastboot mode. You do this by powering the phone off (hold down power and then select Power Off), and then once it's off then holding down the back button and pressing power to turn it on, and it drops your phone into a special mode called fastboot usb.

I still had mine plugged into my pc, and a quick 'fastboot devices' in the command prompt showed that the device was connected.
Then 'fastboot boot daldroid-recovery.img' booted up the image.
I couldn't do the nandroid backup like they suggested - I think it wanted root access, but selected wipe and then 'apply update' and voila.

And it damn well worked too!
Rebooting afterwards gave me a nice clean HTC Magic rom with none of the Chungwha branding and an english keyboard.

I then followed the wiki article on Magic Rooting and got a terminal emulator and installed su as per the instructions.

Excellent!!! I have ROOT!

Lastly.. I came across this post by Haykuro whereby he'd made the new HTC Keyboard installer available. This was prettymuch my only gripe with the Magic so I installed it at once.

Oh man.. it makes such a difference and I feel like I'm home as it's the same keyboard I had on my HTC Touch Diamond.

I made a short video to show you all how good it is and a short review of the HTC Magic I have now.




Enjoy!

2 comments:

  1. is it the same rom you had on the phone before? I want to be able to get root access on my current rom - 3Australia.....

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  2. Depends what firmware and SPL you have on your phone currently.
    Mine was sourced from Taiwan/HK and they have a newer SPL than the ones out of Europe had. I don't know what 3Australia uses on theirs though.
    Best thing is to check the version numbers of your phone - though I think SPL you can only determine when it's in fastboot mode (you turn the phone off, then turn it on while holding down the back key to drop it into this mode).
    Once you've done that you should be able to get the information directly from the fastboot displayed onscreen.

    Check xda-dev for your info and see if anyone else has rooted that version/spl.
    One of the biggest problems with the newer SPL's is that you apparently can't back them up with nandroid like you could the earlier versions as they use a different memory offset for stuff apparently.

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