18 Mar 10 How to flash Modaco’s HTC Sense ROM onto Nexus One
This is my sequel from Rooting the Nexus One, of which I decided to flash MoDaCo Custom ROM with HTC Sense which is actually from the HTC Desire.
Again, this is done with the valuable guide by theunlockr.com. Read this
How To: Load a Custom ROM on the Nexus One before continuing below. 
First and most important of all, the Recovery Image. Follow II. Flash a Custom Recovery Image from theunlockr.com.
If you have not Root the phone with the previous guide, make sure the fastboot devices command is able to detect your phone.
Done!
Now instead of pressing the trackball while powering up the phone (to go into bootloader), you need to press the Volume Down while powering up your Nexus One to boot into Recovery image.
Select RECOVERY (the second in the menu) and the first thing to do is do a backup!
Select Nand Backup and press trackball to confirm.
Prepare for the new ROM.
You should have downloaded the ROM of your selection by now. I chose the MoDaCo Sense UI Nexus One ROM just because I needed the HTC Sense.
You can download the other ROMs but bear in mind that the following is for MoDaCo Sense UI Nexus One ROM although there shouldn’t be too much of difference (if any).
What we need to do is to copy the ROM downloaded as zip file to the phone’s sdcard then using the Recovery image to flash it into the phone.
The photo above is the completed steps.
1) On the recovery screen, select Toggle USB-MS to enable you to copy the zip file to the sdcard.
2) Disable the USB-MS
3) Then do a wipe, selecting data/factory reset
4) Flash zip from sdcard and select the downloaded zip which you have copied to it
Just wait for the process to complete and then reboot the phone.
You should see the following HTC Quietly Brilliant screen.
Note that if you have the Dalvik Debug Monitor, I would advise you to use it and check what is going on behind the process, as my first attempt to reboot the phone was unsuccessful, due to myself not doing a wipe on the phone first.
If you have reached here and succcessfully rebooted your phone, then congrats! It’s done.
Following are some of the screens of my Nexus One running MoDaCo’s HTC Desire ROM.
I noticed that the Wifi connection settings allowed selection of index key in this version as opposed to when I had my HTC Hero Experience.
The following home screen now looks so familar to me.
And this was the one previously on HTC Hero.
And this is after I changed the Live Wallpaper and had the Nexus One screen locked.
It’s beautiful isn’t it?
Tags: custom ROM, HTC Desire ROM, HTC Sense ROM, Modaco, MoDaCo Custom ROM, Nexus One, Recovery Image, root Android, rooting
16 Mar 10 How to Root Nexus One
After the first few days of using the Nexus One, I had the itch to look for HTC Sense’s ROM for it.
That’s because there is a few features that I love with the Sense that wasn’t packaged to the stock ROM, particularly the calendar and shortcut in searching for contacts to dial or send message to.
Anyway, I decided to stay with the stock ROM for a while to familiarize myself to it, hoping I could get a better comparison of it with other ROMs in the future.
So after a two weeks of having the stock ROM, I decided it’s time to move on.
The first thing to load a custom ROM, like what I had done and shown for HTC Hero, Loading a custom ROM to Android phone, is to ‘ROOT’ the phone.
All the steps are done by following the guide from http://theunlockr.com.
This post does not mean to replace the guide from theunlockr so please use the following along with theunlockr’s guide.
1) Download Superboot, there’s a few version, so check your phone version from the About menu first and download the correct one. I downloaded ERE27 without himem enabled.
2) Unzip it to C:\superboot and run those commands according to guide. Well I had the USB driver for Nexus One installed prior to this, if you have not done so, maybe this post would help.
Above is the bootloader screen which you should see when powering up the phone while holding the trackball button.
With the phone connected to USB, running the command above and getting your phone serial displayed indicate a successful connection.
The screen below will prompt you that the rooting or unlocking the bootloader will void your warranty.
So at this point you should really consider if you want to do this, or I guess you should have decided before taking this path?! 
Rooting is as easy as running just three commands and once the phone restart, you should see a difference on the load screen with an additional lock (that is unlocked) image.
This rooting on Nexus One was done on my Windows computer, for a guide on Linux where drivers are needed, check out this post by Bernie.
Now, what’s next after Rooting? Your phone data has been erased (photos and files are still intact, don’t worry).
You can either restart using your phone afresh with the stock/original ROM, or load a custom ROM into it.
Since you have rooted it, might as well load a custom ROM?
Tags: Nexus One, root Android, rooting
31 Oct 09 Loading a custom ROM to Android phone
The Original Screen
As mentioned earlier in the HTC Hero experience post, one most important thing missing for South East Asian phones is the Android Market.
To workaround this, there are many geeks who had replace their ROM with a modified version that comes with the Android Market easily.
I have tried the same, using the steps made available from http://theunlockr.com.
What you need to do to have a custom ROM is actually ‘rooting’ the phone and then load the custom ROM.
It is something similar to iPhone’s term of ‘jailbreaking’.
Please proceed with caution if you intend to root and mod your Android phone, you’d probably risk breaking your phone’s warranty and worst, breaks the phone itself.
Do note also, without the Android market, which has tons of applications, you have to source for apps through other means, mostly third party Android app libraries or from the app author’s website.
If you’re still undecided, try spending some time doing some research at the following sites first:
XDA Developers HTC Dream forum
XDA Developers HTC Magic forum
XDA Developers HTC Hero forum
Some guide for you to follow before the rooting process, such as battery and allocating enough time here.
If you still need some reasons to do it, go here.
Well, I found that I had to take the risk and this is what I did to obtain the Android Market (and probably voids my Hero’s warranty too):
1) Backup my SD card content to PC
2) Root it :
http://theunlockr.com/2009/08/27/how-to-root-your-htc-hero-in-one-click/ (First trial failed, due to my HERO version is later than the image recovery, so I had to unroot it first – as specified in the page)
Unroot : http://theunlockr.com/2009/10/03/how-to-unroot-the-htc-hero/
3) Load the custom ROM : http://theunlockr.com/2009/08/27/how-to-load-a-custom-rom-on-your-htc-hero/
The whole process completes within 30 minutes or so.
The only thing that I need to set manually is the Mobile Network APN. You will need to set it if your mobile data connection does not work.
You should also probably be prepared to have all your data in the phone wiped off.
I was prepared for it to format everything, as I have already planned to root/flash it when I purchased the unit.
However, I do notice that files are still there after I did the rooting/loading the custom ROM.
Using USB with HTC Sync to backup
Remember to run the Nandroid backup before running the update
This is the custom ROM, woot!
The custom ROM I used is Modaco, another popular mod is Cyanogen.
After the process is complete and mobile data connection works, the Hero has finally become a real Hero, and the next few hours were used for shopping in the Android market, what else!
Apps in the market that I found to be cool will be coming in the next post, stay tuned.
Tags: Android M, Android Market, custom ROM, Cyanogen, HTC Dream, HTC Hero, HTC Magic, jailbreak, Modaco, root Android, rooting
