[Captivate General] thehobster:
So, I've been ready to throw the Captivate away.

When I originally rooted and loaded Cognition 3.04 (Eclair based), everything worked like a charm. I used it for quite some time and was totally happy. For some reason that escapes me now, I decided to flash back to stock. And there is where my trouble began.

I used the Odin one-click that has the official 2.1 image included (file name I897UCJF6-final-OCD-REV0). That worked OK, but it seems to have disabled my 3 finger salute to recovery mode. This is on a batch 1009 phone.

I stayed with that for a while, and then the official AT&T Froyo came out. Oh my - what a piece of crap that is. I had lags, GPS problems, battery drain, and more.

So, I decided to move to Cognition 4.1.1. The first problem I ran into was rooting. With recovery mode effectively disabled, I ended up using the GalaxyS_One-Click_Root_All_Models file. So, I was rooted.

So I'm thinking load ROM Manager and I'm good to go. Wrong. Seems there is a new version of the boot loader in Froyo that requires ROMs to be signed. Cognition isn't, so it wouldn't load. Various places mention how you can change various things to make the bootloader version 3e look like 2e (which doesn't require signature and is standard on Eclair). None of those worked for me and ended up bricking my phone (AT&T white boot screen hang) from screwing around with system files. Word of advice - know well what you're doing before you patch individual files in ANY operating system.

As luck would have it, I ordered the $10 JiG from Josh over at MobileTechVideos (and boy did it get here fast - we're only about 2 hours away from each other). The JiG got me back to Download mode, so I once again used the one click Odin (see above) to reload Eclair.

With Eclair loaded, I again used the one click root (see above), loaded ROM Manager and proceeded to flash Cognition - or so I thought. Minor detail - CWM wasn't loaded so the installation failed with the error Installation aborted. I used ROM Manager to load CWM. Then I used ROM Manager to load Cognition. Since I dropped back to Eclair, I didn't have to worry about the 2e/3e/signed bootloader issue.

As Cognition 4.1.1 loaded I took notes on what I was seeing. It took longer than I remembered (but then again I was very eager to see this finally work). It did the backup, formatting, installing, and there was a funky message that was hard to read that showed up on a black screen which said "Don't turn off system." After a brief time, the phone rebooted. The white screen came back and stayed on. I'm thinking - great - not again. But as I was waiting, I could hear the phone talking to me (sounding alot like Rosie from the Jetsons) saying something about partition, backup, and 2 minutes ETA). That was a very reassuring message to know I wasn't again bricked.

After a bit, the Galaxy S screen came on. It was on long enough to make me think it was hanging again. I waited it out, and soon thereafter the phone came up.

Cognition 4.1.1 is finally loaded. Now to play with it.

I hope someone finds this story useful. In other words, don't do what I did. But if you do, follow my steps and you should be fine.

In summary:

1 - Flash to stock Eclair

2 - Root

3 - Load ROM Manager from Android Market

4 - Load CWM from ROM Manager

5 - Copy the ROM on to the root of the internal SD card

6 - Use ROM Manager to load the ROM

7 - Wait patiently while it does its thing