[Miscellaneous Android Development] N00b-un-2:
Cyanogen Mod 7 works on the Kyros 7005 too!!!

I am happy to say that the presumably broken Coby Kyros 7005 I purchased on Ebay arrived this afternoon. As advertised, it was locked and the previous owner had lost the password. This was easy enough to deal with though. It took a little playing around since I could not access the device via ADB to reboot into recovery I just had to pray that the manufacturers thought to include a hardware access. Thankfully they did. For all of you who own the 7005, the way to access the recovery is power+home. A quick factory reset and cache wipe, and I was back in business!

Then came the matter of wanting to upgrade past the abysmally outdated firmware, the next course of action was to root, flash custom recovery and then look around for a ROM to flash.

I installed z4root via adb (pulled it off of my phone after downloading it from the market. I'm sure there are easier ways of doing this but hey... it worked right?)

then after permanently rooting, I made two attempts at flashing clockwork mod using the 'update.zip' method. It failed, but I was able to flash clockwork after rebooting the 7005 and gaining access via root shell. I'm sure that terminal emulator would have gotten the job done as well, but I type way faster on a real keyboard. :D

then I first extracted the recovery.img out of the cwm zip file and pushed it via adb to the root of the sd card. Then I used the command

# flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery.img

after a few seconds, it dropped me back to a root prompt, so I did adb reboot recovery and crossed my fingers hoping that I didn't just brick the 7005. I am happy to report that this method worked just fine, and it booted into clockworkmod, at which point I made a nand backup of the tablet and just to be absolutely sure everything was working, I rebooted. It booted into android without a hitch so I began my search for a rom to flash. The directions in the first post are not too clear, but I figured that since I hadn't managed to brick the tablet yet, I was on a roll. I figured that the rom for the X5A-G was compatible with the Kyros 7005.

I tried flashing the rom, and I was very disappointed to find that after flashing I waited for ten minutes staring at a blank screen. The thing refused to boot, but since I had the foresight to make a nand backup of the stock firmware, I just flashed back to stock and did some head scratching. Not being the type to give up, I remembered something from installing Cyanogen Mod, and Gingerbread in particular from my experience flashing phones.

I had forgotten that you HAVE to format /system and do a factory reset and cache wipe before flashing a gingerbread rom over a non gingerbread rom. So I did the format and wipe, and then I reflashed the X5A-G (not the X5A) Cyanogenmod rom and after what seemed like the longest 10 minutes of my life, the little blue android on a skateboard whizzed by on the screen! I had to calibrate the screen at that point, and for some reason until after the first reboot the contols were completely upside down and backwards, and resolution was all kinds of messed up. But after a reboot these problems went away. I just flashed a GAPPS zip that I had from putting CM7 on my phone and after yet another reboot, I had a fully functioning CM7 rom with the Google Market on it.

Not bad for a $60 investment!