I’m not good at writing a tutorial, this is just to jot down the steps I’ve done to flash the FroydVillain ROM. Maybe it might someday be useful for a sad Hero user like me who’s desparate enough to flash a new ROM. Everybody device can face a different problem, so read together with:
Rooting has become a lot painless and easier with the emergence of “one-click root”. I used Unsiversal Androot, just one-click and it’s done.
Contacts: Sync Google contacts. Export Phone contacts to SD card.
SMS: downloaded and installed SMSBackup and Restoreapp from Market and exported to SD card
Calendar: Sync with Google
Apps: Sync with appBrain. Though this won’t sync back to your phone, it’s an easy to remember the apps that you used to install. Other people suggested to use apps like Titanium Backup to backup all the apps, I simply don’t think it’s necessary for me, since I don’t have much apps installed on my device anyway.
3. Search for a suitable ROM
I don’t have any confidence to flash a new ROM until I found the FroydVillain. A perfect Froyo ROM for HTC Hero. Downloaded it and saved it to the root folder of the SD card.
This step becomes a lot handy with ROM Manager, download it from Market. “Backup Current ROM” first. Then “Flash ClockWorkMod Recovery”. After that, click “Reboot into Recovery”. (If this works, go to step 5.)
This is where I got stuck for a few days, whenever I reboot into recovery, a red exclaimation mark inside a triangle appears and it just stucks there till I take out my battery and reboot. At last, I found out that some versions of ClockWorkMod Recovery has a lot of issues. So, I go back to ROM Manager, and choose “Flash Alternate Recovery”, and I choose to install "Amon-Ra Recovery Image".(don't worry, ROM manager will handle this for you.) [Refer screenshots here]
5. Wiping data
After the phone reboot, select Wipe. Then “wipe data/factory reset” and “wipe delvik cache”. Everybody warned that skipping this step can cause an endless loop with bootloader, so be careful. [Refer to this youtube video]
6. Flashing the ROM
After all those above steps, flashing a new ROM has never been so easy. Just go back to the menu, select “Flash zip from sd card”. [Refer to this youtube video] The phone will reboot. (I got stuck again at the VillainROM wallpaper for about 5 minutes. Make me too shocked, but luckily simply rebooting solves the problem)
Well, that’s the end of my attempt, first thing I felt? I missed my HTC Sense :( , now I have to acknowledged how the SenseUI has been beautifully designed. Anyway, with FroydVillain, I have freed up lots of memory and can get all my favorite applications back, there is big room for customization and it become a lot faster.
