Yesterday was a very odd day. At work, we are doing final validation of the data center before we bring it online. At home, we are doing final preparations for the wedding. So it was obviously the right time to upgrade my phone to Gingerbread.
The first chore was picking a ROM. Since I have invested in Liberty, I figured that I would go down that route. After a little research, I had a clear and unambiguous strategy.
- Use ROM Manager to backup the current system
- Flash my phone with the GB leak for the D2
- Update from the GB leak to Liberty GB 0.5
It’s a small list that is chock full of many other steps – and a boatload of assumptions. But this list was my starting point. So I started the process with a backup. That took about thirty minutes. Then I downloaded the leaked ROM. After reading about the process, I realized that ROM Manager wouldn’t do the job. I needed to use RSDLite to perform an SBF restore.
I started to have an odd feeling when I tried to reboot into basic recovery mode. [Note: You can’t use ROM Manager or Clockwork Recovery for this.] After rebooting and getting into recovery, I connected the phone via USB. And nothing happened. I couldn’t see the device in RSDLite. After restarting the phone and getting the right version of RSDLite, I was able to see the phone in the list of devices identified by RSDLIte (that was running on the PC). But when I tried to perform the recovery, I got a series of odd messages that seemed to indicate that the SBF file I had was not the right file for the phone that I have. Arghhh.
Since I didn’t know where to get the right SBF file, I decided that it was time to go back to where I came from. Unfortunately, I had wiped the phone in preparation for Gingerbread. Fortunately, I had taken a backup. So I booted into Clockwork Recovery and started my restore. Too bad that the recovery never finished.
After two hours of waiting for the recovery to finish, I punted. I used Clockwork Recovery to flash back to Liberty 1.5. That worked flawlessly. Then I upgraded to Liberty 2.01. That worked flawlessly as well. So now I just had to rebuild the apps. I figured that this would be easy. I’d just go into the Market, start a download, and watched the rest of the apps download by themselves. Too bad that this did not happen. Instead, I had to download the purchased apps one by one. And then I had to start downloading all of the free apps that I’ve installed.
But there is very good news to the story. I had been having trouble with the phone’s camera. That’s probably because I tried to load a bunch of add-ons last month. When I did, I broke the camera functionality. But now that I have rebuilt the system, all the weird errors are now a thing of the past. My phone is much more functional. And since I store all of my contacts and all of my music in the cloud, I am back to complete functionality. And it only took about six hours of my life.
I will definitely do this again. But next time, I will make sure about the SBF file that I use. And I will prepare a formal checklist. That will ensure that I don’t burn hours in pursuit of something only to find myself performing a costly system cleanup.
-Roo
