[Hero, G2 Touch General] johanzebin:
First time to install Cyanogenmod was not entirely easy :)

Hey all,

I just created an account to be able to post my experience with CGM 7.2 on the HTC Hero GSM. Everything I checked so far works fine, however there's a slight jaggedness in scrolling.

For me as a complete newbie it took about 6 hours to get it to run, mainly because I had to get straight what I actually have to do. There is no paucity of TO-DOs, just no individual one worked for me - I got it sorted out only by combining all kinds of posts from everywhere. That's why I want to share my viewpoint on this - without all kinds of different people airing their piece of the puzzle I would surely have given up!

The specs were as follows; starting with the "fastboot-info":

HERO CVT SHIP S-ON

HBOOT-1.76.0007 (HERO10000)

MICROP-010f

TOUCH PANEL-SYN0104

RADIO-6.35.15.11

Aug 4 2009,19:43:30

And software-information:

Firmware-Version 2.1-update1

Baseband-Version 63.18.55.06PU_6.35.15.11

Kernel-Version 2.6.29-7527f009 htc-kernel@and18-2 #1

Build-Nummer 3.36.405.1 CL199109 release-keys

Software-Nummer 3.36.405.1

Browser-Version WebKit 3.1

So here's what I did:

0) I wrongly assumed that I need to unlock my bootloader directly, i.e. using the software from HTCDev. As I am using Ubuntu Linux, this meant quite a hassle in itself, and I did not manage it after all. The reason was due to an error when trying to get the Identifier Token needed by HTC to send you some clearance-file to unlock the bootloader:

fastboot oem get_identifier_token
...
(bootloader) [ERR] Command error !!!
OKAY [ 0.007s]
finished. total time: 0.007s

I found no solution to this problem, but tried to up- or downgrade my HBOOT-version. Luckily that wasn't necessary after all. A side-effect of it was that I installed adb and fastboot, which I happened to use later on (but are not necessary either).

Let me assure you: Unlocking the bootloader directly (in the HTC-way) is NOT necessary!

1) Getting root access:

I used UniversalAndroot-1.6.2-beta5.apk to do that, and conveniently installed it using

adb push, adb install

though if you don't want to install this nice utility, you can just install a File Browser and then install the package.

Now here's a quirk that cost me about an hour: Using the default settings, UniversalAndroot only claimed to successfully get root-access, but left everything unchanged! Only after finding a comment on some website did I try to check both check-boxes (log and temporary install) - this time it worked (it installs yet another app called SuperUser)! (I then ran it again without the temporary setting enabled, which at least did not revoke the SuperUser-Account). Anyways, adb is handy in this case again because you can just log in with

adb shell

and check if

su

gives you root access or says "Permission denied".

2) Deleting /system/etc/install-recovery.sh I got that idea from androidforums.com, and will probably never know whether it was really necessary. That just shows how desperate I became after 3 hours of poking around in the dark.

3) Installing ROM Manager from Google Market There's probably a quicker way to install recovery images, which does not involve a damn Google account! Or maybe it is not even neccesary.

4) Downloading and installing ClockWorkMod Recovery I did this using the ROM Manager. Again, there might be a more direct way. In any case, I was paranoid enough to install it twice, as it was recommended that way somewhere.

5) Downloading cm-7.2.0-hero.zip and putting it on /sdcard/ Again, I just used

adb push cm-7.2.0-hero.zip /sdcard/

to accomplish this, but my guess is you can just as well do it via USB.

6) Format cache, /data/factory, /boot and /system By that, I mean do this in ClockWorkMod (you get there by booting up with HOME+POWER). The last two locations to reformat are "hidden" in the menu partitions. This step is very important because without it, Cyanogenmod did only loop infinitely (for more than 10min) in its loading screen! I got this idea from the more detailed description at droidforums.

7) Install Cyanogenmod using ClockWorkMod That's straight forward; just select the image from sdcard and you're done!

Hope I didn't forget a vital step, and maybe it is helpful to somebody; at the very least my future ME will maybe find it useful again :).