[Hero, G2 Touch Android Development] Lovyan:
Finally free!

I had an HTC Hero locked to Orange and have finally managed to get it unlocked.

The only information I was sent was:

"HOWTO: Create a GoldCard - Bypassing the RUU/SPL CID check to Root/Downgrade - xda-developers

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=572683

ROM downloads here

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=559622

Make sure you get 2.73.405.5 "

Step 1 - I got stuck at the first point from the first URL where it said Download QMAT here...which takes you to a dead link. Instead I got it from here http://revskills.de/pages/download.html

Step 2 - was fine

Step 3 - then it says use adb to run this command....huh?!!

But eventually I found this thread http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=502010 which again wasn't without it's problems as I kept getting device not found. Reading through the thread people with the same problem talked about having the correct drivers installed. So after deleting the drivers, and doing various other things like setting environment variables to show hidden devices so I could uninstall them etc I was still having no joy as Vista just kept installing them automatically. In the end I had to boot up from my XP hard drive and install the drivers....can't remember which drivers I used in the end, whether it was from my Android_adb_usb drivers folder or android-sdk-windows-1.5_r3, possibly doesn't matter.

Anyway when I rebooted back into Vista my device was now being recognised in adb so I could get the cid code which is in step 3.

Step 8 - The next step I stumbled on was step 8, you need to read note 9 and not jump ahead generating your GoldCard as you will see you need to replace the first two char's with zero's.

Step 10 - Also when emailed the GoldCard mine wasn't zipped. So you just download the .img file somewhere on your computer.

Step 17 - The next part was easy although I feel that in Step 17 they could replace the word "select" with "highlight rows".

Step 19 - At step 19 I was expecting something different to happen, but nothing does.

Step 20 - I struggled with.....to get the adb command to run in step 3 I'd installed different drivers and now to run the HTC RUU file I kept getting error 131 customer invalid or similar. Took me a lot of reading to work out I needed to change back to the official HTC drivers which I did by running a repair of HTC Sync. The RUU then ran through fine.

I also found YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NswYHbZP ... annel_page really useful and actually ended up flashing to the modaco ROM (this was because I didn't know you still had to enter the unlock code and thought it hadn't worked with the RUU, but it had worked) http://content.modaco.net/hero/2.9-upda ... signed.zip.

You'll see that the guy activates HTC Sync both on the phone and the PC, it's a possibility that I wouldn't have had all the drivers issues with adb not recognising my phone if I had mounted it first. Just a thought, I'm only writing this in the hope that it saves someone else from the hours I spent figuring all this out.

Took me far longer than it should have....too embarrassed to admit to how many hours, but it wasn't easy. I'm off to work out how to use my new phone now!!