Japanties!

As mentioned in the rooting post, backing up your phone in it’s entirety is one of the best reasons for rooting.

With the new recovery that is installed, you now have the option of performing a Nandroid backup. This is a complete backup of everything in your phone’s ROM, and it is ALWAYS recommended to take a nandroid backup before applying a new rom or theme.

To get into recovery and perform a backup:

• Turn off your phone
• Hold down the “Home” key, then press power. Do not release “Home” until the recovery menu comes up.
• Scroll down to “Perform Nandroid Backup”

The backup will begin, and takes about 2-3 minutes. Once complete, you will have a nandroid folder on your sdcard. It is stored by your phone’s serial, then by date taken. Inside are several files that I will describe in a moment.

You may have noticed the menu option for restore most recent backup. This will look for that folder, and re-flash the backup to the phone. I suggest only using this if you have flashed a ROM that is broken in some way.

At this point, if you just wanted to backup the phone, you can just reboot with “Home + Back” at the same time.

Looking at the nandroid folder, inside the backup just taken, you will see a list of files:

• boot.img – The kernel and base code for the OS
• data.img – Your user data. This includes applications installed from the Market, and their preferences.
• splash1.img – The picture displayed when you first turn on the phone. Default is the G1 logo.
• system.img – This is the OS itself, where the framework and all your basic applications reside.
• cache.img – This is there T-Mobile downloads your OTA updates to usually. Commonly left blank otherwise
• misc.img – Misc data
• recovery.img – The recovery partition, used for flashing other ROMs etc.
• splash2.img – Another location for storing the G1 boot logo. Usually unused.
• nandroid.md5 – Hashes of the files dumped, to help ensure they are not corrupt after a transfer.

I typically recommend restoring via the recovery menu. This is much easier overall, and just requires that you have the backups in the right place on your SD card. If you need a more advanced recovery, I recommend looking up details on Fastboot (your phone now supports this!).

Note that since you are restoring a backup, ALL data on the phone will be restored back to the point in time the backup was taken! Gmail and such should be synced first. Any new apps you installed (or upgraded) since the backup will need to be redone. The only exception is the contents of your SD card.

Tags: Android, cyanogen, g1, mod, nandroid, root, xda

Rooting the wife’s G1

So my wife finally let me root her white G1, largely due to the drastic speed improvements that Cyanogen’s custom rom has, and the great theme by DrPFenderson. Since the XDA forums are generally tuned more for the hardcore user, here are the quick and dirty steps I took to get her phone done in about 30 minutes or so, not counting the time to backup her SD card.

First things first.

Your phone’s battery HAS to be at least 75-80% charged…

A lot of the work you will be doing is in modes where the phone will not charge!

Your phone’s data will be erased!

As long as you have a Google account properly set up on your phone, any of your synced data should be fine. This includes contacts, email from your gmail account, and your calendar. If you want to make 100% certain your sync data is up to date, go to settings on your phone, then “Data Synchronization”, hit menu and select “Sync Now”.

Backup anything from your SD card you want to keep!

It will be completely erased and formatted during this.

Now, on to the modding:

Grab a custom G1 (or MyTouch3g) ROM from XDA. If this is your first time, stick with Cyanogen’s mod Stable. Save this file somewhere safe.

Head over to TheUnlockr.com for their slick and easy rooting application. They have a great video that walks you through the process, and is much easier than previous hacks. Grab the 2 files listed on the site, but don’t start just yet.

During the process, they will tell you to copy various files to the SD card (an APK file, a .IMG file). While doing this, also copy the mod you just downloaded (usually update-cm-4.0.4-signed.zip or similar name). We will need this during the rooting process.

Once the files are copied, make sure to “Safely Remove” (for windows) or “Unmount” (linux) the drive before disabling the USB mount on the phone or unplugging it from the USB cable! The last thing you want is corrupt files while rooting.

The rooting…

Now it is time to follow the steps in TheUnlockr.com’s video. When they tell you to flash you own custom ROM, this is the time to use the “update-cm-4.0.4-signed.zip” file that you got from Cyanogen’s site. First, we need to clear our user data, as many of the applications will have changed and we want a fresh start. Choose “Wipe data/Factory reset”, then confirm. After this is complete, now scroll to “Apply any Zip”, then choose the “update-cm-4.0.4-signed.zip” file you saved. This part will take a big longer than the wipe.

When it says that the flash is complete, it is time to reboot the phone into our custom firmware. Scroll to the “Reboot now” option and click.

This is the time where you will need some patience. Since the system is fresh, some internal optimizations have to now be performed, and this can take up to 5-10 minutes. During this, you should see a new boot logo blinking on the screen. Eventually this will get replaced by the greeting android logo, and your first setup will be needed again. Login with your Google account, and give the phone a few minutes to settle in.

From here, you have full root access on your phone.

What does this mean? Well, now you can theme your device, use wireless tethering applications to surf the internet on your laptop via your 3g connection, remove ads from websites on your phone’s browser, install mini linux distributions, or completely back up your entire phone.

Read on if you want to install DrPFenderson’s great Enoch theme…

First, grab the update file from the site, then copy it to your SD card. Remember to remove / eject before unplugging!

Next, we need to reboot the phone and enter the Recovery mode. Turn off the phone, hold down the “Home” key, and press the power button. Don’t let go until the recovery menu is on the screen.

Once here, scroll down to the “Apply any Zip” again, then choose the theme’s .zip file (signed-enoch-1.2.2.zip) and confirm. This flash should only take a moment. Once done, scroll to Reboot and press. While this is not going to take as long as installing Cyanogen’s ROM, it still has to re-optimize several of the applications… patience is what counts!

Once the phone is done booting, give it a couple of minutes to settle down. Unlock the phone, and enjoy your new, slick looking Android!

ToDo: Add pictures! I will toss in screencaps of the process on my next root…

Tags: Android, cyanogen, drpfenderson, g1, mod, root, theme, xda