Update a Motorola Milestone from Motorola Firmware to CyanogenMod 7
All credit Goes 2 Mr.Muh for his User frindly guide
Source : [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
All credit Goes 2 Mr.Muh for his User frindly guide
Source : [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Since Motorola abandoned the Milestone
a long time ago, the only way to enjoy an (almost) up-to-date Android
experience is to install a custom ROM. In this post I’ll explain how to
root your Milestone, backup your data, install CyanogenMod 7 and restore
your data again.
First of all, the usual warnings:
- This whole article only applies
to the Motorola Milestone A853, the GSM version of the Verizon Droid.
No other Milestone versions or other phones are supported! - If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it.
- If you mess up your phone (you cannot
permanently brick a Milestone without a lot of knowledge and some
serious bad faith, but you could easily lose all your data), don’t blame
me or mr. muh, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. - If you think you made a mistake and you don’t know how to continue, then don’t!
Connect your Milestone to the wall charger and ask somebody for help;
you could, for instance, start up an IRC client, connect to the freenode network
and join #milestone or #milestone-modding. I (pontomedon) am usually
there, as well as there are a lot of people who know a lot more than i
do.
A few general things about the Milestone:
- Motorola signed our boot (contains the
Linux kernel) and recovery (contains the recovery) partitions, so we
cannot replace either of those with custom built images. CyanogenMod
7.1.2 for Milestone (the current version at the time of writing) runs
Android 2.3.7 on the original Motorola boot partition (=kernel) from
Android 2.2, which is possible because of a number of advanced hacks i
cannot explain in detail here (partly because they’re outside of the
scope of this article and partly because i don’t understand them
myself). - In case of the recovery the situation
is similar, we cannot replace the recovery partition by a custom
recovery, but there is a workaround to get all the functionality of a
custom recovery: Due to a bug
in the original Android 2.0 recovery code, it is possible to execute
modified update.zip files, and it is also possible to create a special
update.zip to extend the stock recovery with a lot of special features
(this is exactly what OpenRecovery (OR) does, and it is also what the
original root-exploit did). By the way, for those who are interested,
the bug was instantly fixed
after the Motorola Droid (the original, Verizon Wireless version of the
Milestone) was rooted, but at that time the Milestone was already
shipping with the bug on board. - From a not-rooted phone, the only way
to replace the recovery partition with the vulnerable Android 2.0
recovery is to flash an SBF file. An SBF file is a proprietary Motorola
format for mobile device images. Flashing an SBF file is done with
RSDLite (a Windows only tool by Motorola) or sbf_flash, a Linux/Mac
command line utility created by a member of the Droid/Milestone modding
community, [mbm]. I’ll explain the process with both tools.
A quick overview on what we’ll be doing:
- Install OR (consisting of an update.zip and a directory with a lot of scripts) on the SD card.
- Install the recovery partition from Android 2.0, because this version contains the bug mentioned above.
- Boot into OR
- [Optional]: Prepare your SD card for Apps2Ext.
- Backup your data.
- Install CyanogenMod 7 for Milestone.
- Restore your data.
- [Optional, later]: Update your CyanogenMod to the latest version.
Before you continue: Make sure
your battery is fully charged, you won’t be able to charge it while
you’re booted into the bootloader or the recovery, and recovery eats A
LOT of battery (it will be empty after two or three hours, so don’t take
too much time to finish!).
Install OpenRecovery- If there is a file called update.zip on your SD card, please delete it to make sure you don’t accidentally install a wrong update.zip in step 3.
- Download OpenRecovery v1.46
and unzip the contents of the ZIP archive to the root of your SD card.
This download contains the original OpenRecovery v1.46, modified to
include modules and libraries for SD card management (partitioning,
support for ext2/3/4 file systems). Other modifications include fixes
for the keyboard layout and baseband selectors. Most of the
modifications were done by the creator of CyanogenMod4Milestone,
nadlabak. For reference: the original, unmodified OR by Skrilax_CZ can be downloaded here, the original extension by nadlabak is found here. The latest fixes included in my download are, however, not available anywhere else.
1
3daa6cdd85bb886b9da7287e21f2d79f OpenRecovery_v1_46_SHOLS_inkl_ext_mmcfix_parted_update.zip - Update 2012-09-11: Nadlabak recompiled a few kernel
modules, might fix some of the sd card errors during nandroid backup –
they are now included in the download. - Update 2012-09-17: Please use the provided OR, it
is the only way you get everything you need and the latest fixes. Many
people seem to use different things like Androidiani or patching OR
themselves etc and many of of those run into problems sooner or later.
50% of my effort in the comments below is wasted on of this. - You should now have a file called “update.zip” and a directory called “OpenRecovery” on your SD card.
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Install the “vulnerable recovery”
There are two versions of this step,
depending on your operating system. Windows users have to do part A,
Linux and Mac users have to do part B.
1 | 02adc6275a555a3c7dafda399998b109 vulnerable_recovery_only_RAMDLD90_78.sbf |
1 2 | de922742e1940283cf8f2af745e7e5d8 MotoHelper_2.1.32_Driver_5.4.0.exe eddaedf5590fdae8d6189cfecae0c721 RSDLite5.6.msi |
holding the DPad-Up button while turning it on again. You should see
some white-on-black text saying “Bootloader” now. It would be a good
idea to write down your bootloader version now – it will be one of
80.89, 90.72, 90.73, 90.74 and 90.78.
window; model should be “S Flash OMAP3430″ and status should be
“Connected…”. Click on that line, then the “Device Properties” section
should be populated with information about your phone.
and hold the hotkey all the time while RSDLite flashes. It is very
important that you immediately boot into recovery after flashing it, if
you boot into Android only once, chances are good that you’ll have to
re-flash it.
will, after a while, complain that you should manually power the phone
on, but you can safely close RSDLite as soon as your phone is booted
into recovery (ignore any warnings when closing RSDLite).
1 | 02adc6275a555a3c7dafda399998b109 vulnerable_recovery_only_RAMDLD90_78.sbf |
1 | db8afd24f7a0dc6d3d78556dec811694 sbf_flash |
holding the DPad-Up button while turning it on again. You should see
some white-on-black text saying “Bootloader” now. It would be a good
idea to write down your bootloader version now – it will be one of
80.89, 90.72, 90.73, 90.74 and 90.78.
and hold the hotkey all the time while sbf_flash flashes. It is very
important that you immediately boot into recovery after flashing it, if
you boot into Android only once, chances are good that you’ll have to
re-flash it.
1 2 | chmod +x sbf_flash ./sbf_flash vulnerable_recovery_only_RAMDLD90_78.sbf |
- Your phone should reboot (into recovery since you’re holding the hotkey) automatically after the flash is done.
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Boot into OR
How you can boot into recovery depends on your bootloader version.
For the bootloader version 90.78, the hotkey is x (the letter x on your
hardware keyboard); for all other bootloader versions, the hotkey is the
camera button. You need to press and hold the hotkey while you turn the
phone on. Once you see the triangle with the exclamation mark in it,
you can release the hotkey. Now press and hold the volume-up button and
press the camera button to enter the actual recovery menu. If you see
yellow text, you’ve done it right. What you see now is the stock
recovery menu, to enter OR you have to select “apply sdcard:update.zip”
(navigation is done with the DPad on the hardware keyboard, DPad-Center
acts as enter). After a few seconds you should see a different menu, and
the top line should say “Motorola MILESTONE Open Recovery”. If not,
then something might have gone wrong in step 1. If yes, congratulations,
you’ve successfully entered OR!
OR provides a more comfortable method of navigation, you can now use
the volume buttons to navigate and the camera button to select. The
first thing you should do is selecting the correct keyboard layout for
your hardware keyboard:
Now we come to the part why booting into recovery immediately after
flashing was important: Motorolas OTA updates install a script called
install-recovery.sh into your system partition, which overwrites the
recovery with the stock (non-vulnerable) recovery on every single
Android boot. We obviously don’t want this as we just flashed the
vulnerable recovery, so we have to remove this file.
- Select “Console” to enter the OR console
- Type
It might complain that the file doesn’t exist, which is possible if
1
rm -f /system/etc/install-recovery.sh
you never did an OTA update, but i’d double (and triple) check for
typos… - You can type
to exit the console
1
exit
Be sure to have at least 1GB of free space on your SD card for this
step (If you’ve done step 4 the free space on your FAT32 partition will
have decreased by 1GB, but you still need about 1GB of free space for
the backup!).
OpenRecovery will now perform a nandroid backup, which is basically a
full backup of your phone, including the Motorola firmware. If anything
goes wrong you can always restore from this point. Nandroid backups are
stored in a directory called “nandroid” on your SD card.
- Once the Backup is finished, return to the main menu by selecting “Go Back” twice.
- Root the phone by selecting “Root Phone”.
- Reboot by selecting “Reboot System”.
We have now created an emergency backup, but we’ll now create a
second, more user friendly backup using an extremely powerful app called
Titanium Backup.
- Download and install Titanium Backup from the Android Market and start it.
- Upon start up, the Superuser app will ask if you allow root access
of Titanium Backup, press allow and yes (you might have to restart
Titanium Backup afterwards). - Change to the Backup/Restore tab, bring up the menu and select “Batch”.
- After calculating the different scenarios has finished, click the
Run button next to “Backup all user apps + system data”, then click “Run
the Batch operation” (this will take a while).
I would also suggest to check whether your contacts are properly
synced to Google: Open GMail, select “Contacts” from the drop down menu
and check if all the contacts from your phone also appear there. If not,
you might have stored some contacts to your phone memory instead of
your Google account, I suggest to put them all on your Google account,
they’re safer there. You can also use the chance to perform that
long-overdue cleanup of your contacts
.Now you can safely wipe (aka Factory Restore) your phone.
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Install CyanogenMod 7
Installing CyanogenMod is rather straight forward:
Just like the other ZIP files, download them to the
OpenRecovery/updates directory. If you’re unsure whether your bpsw and
devtree are from 2.2 or not, just download those files, applying them
twice is not harmful.
to clear all your data (we backed them up twice, so they’re safe).
By the way, you can ignore the three update files starting with
“test-”, those are only interesting for developers. If they annoy you,
you can delete them from the OpenRecovery/updates directory of your SD
card.
- Select the Google apps update ZIP file and confirm that you want to install it.
- If you downloaded the BPSW Update and the Devtree Update, then apply those as well.
- [optional] If you have enough free space on your SD card you might
want to go back to the main menu and make another nandroid backup. - When you’re done, select reboot from OR’s main menu and enjoy your
first boot of CyanogenMod 7 (The first boot takes longer than the
following boots, so don’t panic if it takes a few minutes). - Once you’re booted into CyanogenMod, check if you have 3G
connectivity, if not, you might have to select a different baseband
configuration in Settings->Device Settings->Baseband selection.
Changing the baseband configuration requires a reboot!
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Restore
Android Market again. When you start the app, it will (like before) ask
for root privileges, press remember and allow (you might have to restart
Titanium Backup afterwards).
You should now have all your user apps back, but your system app
settings are still missing. You could, of course, just restore them all
with the according batch operation (“Restore all system data”), but i
don’t recommend that, because most of the system settings contain the
default values from the Motorola firmware, and you’re better off with
the new default values from CyanogenMod. There are a few system apps
you’ll want to restore though; and we’ll restore them one by one.
- On the Backup/Recovery tab of Titanium Backup, click the label
“Click to edit filters” in the top-right corner, select the “System”
radio button in the second row of radio buttons and click “Apply” in the
top-right corner. - For each system app you want to restore, click the app, select
Restore from the pop-up menu and confirm that you want to restore “Data
only”. Apps that you’ll want to restore are, for instance: - Bluetooth Pairings
- [BOOKMARKS] Browser
- [CONTACTS/CALLS] Contacts Storage
- [VOICEMAIL] Dialer
- [SMS/MMS/APN] Dialer Storage
- [SMS/MMS PREFS] Messaging
- [USER DICT] User Dictionary
- Wi-Fi Access Points
If you’re not sure you absolutely need a specific system app to be
restored, then don’t restore it, because if you miss anything in a week,
you can still open Titanium Backup and restore it then.</li>
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Update your CyanogenMod to the latest version
CyanogenMod is updated quite frequently, I suggest that you check the CyanogenMod download page every few weeks, because you’ll have to install updates manually. It’s a really straight forward task:
from the power menu and you don’t even have to bother with the stock
recovery anymore, CyanogenMod will reboot you directly into OR).
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