Well, this past week I became the new owner of an HTC HD2 phone. I had read that you can flash them to Android, and so begins my saga! I have it most of way, but it is still a little flaky. I was actually surprised that it was more difficult than I remember my G1 being. It was because there were too many partial directions that conflicted.
Below, I will give you some unorganized links and thoughts. It was too crazy to create a step by step process.
First step was to download the SPL. I followed this thread. Then, it said to do a factory reset. I found that here.
Next, I had to boot into my Windows partition. That was kind of disappointing because I normally use Ubuntu, but I couldn’t find any alternative. Then, I installed WMDC 6.1, which you can get here: Microsoft Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1 for Windows Vista (32-bit). It validates that you have a valid Windows copy, so Wine was out of the question.
Next, if I remember right, I flashed the MagLDR interface. You can find that here. With the phone connected to WMDC, I ran the DAF.exe program. That program flashed the boot loader onto the phone, and I believe it was at this point that Windows quit working on the phone.
I chose to try the Kingdom ROM by Derrick. I chose it because it included Sense 3.0, and it looked good. I think the Sense 3.0 is what is causing the flakiness.
For that ROM, I downloaded the 400MB partition layout, and I flashed that with that DAF.exe program again. I believe to get the phone connected, I had to boot into MagLDR and put it in USB Flash mode.
Finally, I placed the ROM zip file on the SD card (you can do that from MagLDR using the USB Mount mode). Then, I used the Clockwork MOD interface to load the zip file.
This is the main thread that I followed:
[TUT] Flashing your First GSM USA 1024LEO ONLY!! (For Noobs)
I had an issue with the SD card not working. The phone would not mount it, but instead it kept asking to format it. I would give it the okay to format and it would say “External Media in Unknown State”. I found the fix on this post. Here’s what I did:
- I turned the phone off to start
- I turned the phone on with the power button and I held it down until I saw the MagLdr boot screen.
- In the MagLdr menu, I chose option #8 — AD Recovery
- Chose “Advanced” from the Clockwork Recovery Menu
- Chose the “Partition SD Card” option
- Chose the “1042” option
- Chose the “0” option when it prompted for Swap
- It took a minute to run, but then, I used the menu to restart the phone.
When that process was done, my SD mounted automatically for me. I have an 8 GB card, and now when mounted in Ubuntu via USB, it shows a 6.9 GB drive. (I later found this person had the same problem that I had) Here’s a good list of steps to go through. I wish I had found this and understood it when I first started. I learned that the fix permissions thing is done from the MagLdr/Clockwork Recovery Interface. Here’s another good list of instructions. I think this is the Task 29 thing they talk about. Here’s how I did the GLX Fix:
- Attached phone to USB and copied zip file to the SD card.
- I turned the phone off to start
- I turned the phone on with the power button and I held it down until I saw the MagLdr boot screen.
- In the MagLdr menu, I chose option #8 — AD Recovery
- Chose “install zip from sdcard” from the Clockwork Recovery Menu
- Chose “choose zip from sdcard”
Here’s how I did the Fix Permissions:
- Attached phone to USB and copied zip file to the SD card.
- I turned the phone off to start
- I turned the phone on with the power button and I held it down until I saw the MagLdr boot screen.
- In the MagLdr menu, I chose option #8 — AD Recovery
- Chose “advanced” from the Clockwork Recovery Menu
- Then, “fix permissions”
- Took a while for it to run
- Pressed the Back arrow to go back to the main menu
- Chose “reboot system”
The Hot Spot Tethering did not work for me. It made the phone reboot once. My laptop (running Ubuntu 11.04) saw the wireless network, but it showed that it was unsecured. Actually, I had configured it for WPA2 Personal security with a passphrase. I never could get the laptop to connect, so I dropped back to the Wireless Tether App I had used with my G1. You can download it from here. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either because it causes the device to reboot when you activate it.
Things that Work
- Wifi
- Chrome to Phone
- Market
- Camera
Issues:
- Not responding message on startup (doesn’t prevent or hurt anything, just looks bad)
- Lines across screen, artifacts (again, no big deal)
- GPS broken — Google Maps crashes when GPS is enabled
- Weather — locked my phone up once, had to force close — it animates jerky for a minute, then freezes and locks up; weather widget works though and it does the animation when it unlocks
- Accelerometer doesn’t seem to work — haven’t notice phone auto rotating at all, tried Labyrinth Lite and can’t play
- Wireless Hot Spot/WiFi Tethering
- Haven’t used the phone a lot, but a few of the people I spoke with said the voice quality was bad — not sure if it was a location thing, my phone, or the ROM
- Camcorder — known issue, I read that v5.0 of the ROM will have the camcorder working