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Installing Cyanogen 4.1.9999 and unofficial Android Builds

Submitted by carneeki on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 07:51

So... for a long time I was worried about potentially turning my G1 into a brick by stuffing up the installation at some point. I was also worried about localisation of firmware to be an issue - and that maybe I somehow wouldn't be able to revert.

This morning I upgraded from Optus Australia's OTA Cupcake 1.5 distribution to the Cyanogen 4.1.9999 release thanks to FlashRec as well as HTC's official ADP1 v1.6 restore image.

Here's how I did it... (I'm not going to give a command by command / line by line description - if you don't know your operating system well enough to do this stuff yourself, get a friend to do it for you instead).

  1. Grabbed the necessary files:
    • CyanogenMod 4.1.9999.
    • FlashRec.
    • HTC's official ADP1 v1.6 restore image.
    • flash_image. This file was sent to me by rikupw on #cyanogenmod on irc.freenode.net asking if I could host it on his behalf. Good thing I did because I actually needed it later ;) I'm not sure who wrote / compiled it. It could even be a part of the Android source project. I'll give credit where credit is due and comply with any distribution license you may have.
  2. Format the MicroSD card. Choose Fat32 as a filesystem type (vfat under Ubunu). It's really easiest to do this using an SD card reader, but I didn't have one so I was constantly enabling and disabling USB storage within Android.
  3. Copy both signed-dream_devphone_userdebug-ota-14721.zip and update-cm-4.1.9999-signed.zip to the root directory of the SD card.
  4. Installed FlashRec
  5. Used FlashRec to download the cm-recovery-1.4.img 'recovery' image. The recovery mode is when you hold down Home+Power whilst powering up, it then runs Cyanogen's recovery image. More on that in a moment.
  6. Reboot into Cyanogen's recovery image. Recovery mode allows you to perform updates and a few other neat things without having the full operating system loaded. A simplified analogy would be like using a Linux LiveCD on a computer to recover a Windows password, or fix a problem.
  7. Choose the menu item to use any update.zip file.
  8. Ran the updates (the order is important): signed-dream_devphone_userdebug-ota-14721.zip then update-cm-4.1.9999-signed.zip.
  9. Reboot
  10. Reboot again (a message with "Formatting CACHE:" was present the second time around

The final reboot took a while to run - various forums have quoted to give it 15 minutes, but I felt more like 5 for me. I was running logcat on my laptop watching the boot process inside there. Maybe it was 15 minutes, but I was kept entertained.

If any Australian's are interested in doing it to their Android based G1 / ADP1 and were worried about localisation problems, radio firmware not working, or the device locking down because a different OS is present - fear not for it worked for me!