Rooting my Phone-DEFCON 2

That’s right, I rooted my Moto Droid. Twice now. TWICE. There is something inherently wrong in that statement.

I’ll start at the beginning. I got my Droid sometime in June or July 2010, which was soon after I got my internship at CCP. My old phone was on my family’s plan, and I wanted something that could at least take PICTURES. I loved my little LG to death, he even got ran over by a car and lived, but it was time to move on to bigger, shinier, touchy things.

Fast forward a couple months, I was getting tired of Verizon not getting 2.1 to me fast enough (end even when it said I had a new version of Android available, it still never updated past 2.0.x). I was missing all the pretty little things, like the phone icon on the bottom tray, and extra home panels and all the other magic of Froyo. All this happened, and instead of going to a store to figure out why my phone hated my, I decided to root it. (This was also triggered by the fact I couldn’t wifi tether because Verizon is a bunch of jerks). I should have figured out there was an issue with my phone when it wouldn’t update LEGITIMATELY.

So, I got help from a coworker who had rooted his Droid, he directed me to Bugless Beast. After following all the tutorials on flashing SPRecovery to boot in recovery mode, wipe cache and data (backups didn’t even work), using RSD Lite and all that other nonsense to trying to do the Update from sdcard/update.zip. I have no idea how I finally got it working, but I finally got BB on my phone after a full 2 days of BS. It stayed like this for the better part of 5 months. I got the annoying popups constantly saying I needed to update, but I always ignored them, since the creator of BB said to NOT TO UPDATE THAT WAY. I missed the patch, or whatever fixed that problem, because I didn’t connect my phone to my computer ever.

Then, yesterday, I finally decide to update from BB v0.5 to BB v.06. Simple since it’s only .1 versions later, right? Wrong. After trying every different combination of this, wiping data and cache 5 times, trying to create backups using nandroid, to installing ‘Bugless’ Beast, everything failed, and every time I got the same error, with no help anywhere on what the error codes mean, because the rooting community cannot for the life of them decide on a central location of information. They prefer to disseminate information through forums with broken links.

After the hours of frustration, I decided to try another mod, Cyanogen.  Worked with the update.zip method the first time.  Wouldn’t boot into recovery (which is why I thought I had bricked my phone) but I could at least install something.

Well, after 4 hours trying to get a new BB or even the old one back on my device, nothing worked. Clockwork Mod wouldn’t flash any of the recoveries, SPRecovery wouldn’t boot up in CyanogenMod, Clockwork Mod in Cyanogen started up, but wouldn’t update to the new ROM.

I was ready to slam my phone into a wall last night. I am tempted to just get Verizon to flash EVERYTHING, so I can start from scratch again.

Here’s to hoping my phone isn’t just a terrible piece of machinery.

-TRUTHFUL, adj. Dumb and illiterate.