HTC Hero has been to market a little longer now, and since I have one myself I have rooted the device and installed some custom firmware on it. Why you ask? Well just because I like hacking my own device and love the thrill of breaking it… No really, Ive read a lot about custom roms and how they would speed up your phone too some amazing speeds. I was in unbelief but still wanted to try it out. But the main thing was how, well I will help you get it done on your phone. And do this at your own risk I’m not held responsible of bricking your phone.
Why do it
Well for me its simply because you can, but secondly because a large group of developers exists that have there focus of making this rom as fast as possible, and including lots of extras in the process. One great thing is that you can run Wifi Tethering an application that makes a wireless router of your phone so you can connect to it with your laptop and start internetting. More applications can run that needs root access. You can run a fully functional distro of debian… (if your ever gonna use it), and it makes your phone even faster.
Prerequisites
Well setting up your device to run a custom rom is really easy actually. Just follow me along the way, first of all I will tell you about the prerequisites to do this all.
- USB Cable
Well where would you be without connecting the device to your PC.
- A HTC Hero
Yup, sorry this guide is only for the HTC Hero.
- Root Access to your device
To install the rom you need to have root access on the device, I will post instructions on howto obtain root access on a HTC Hero later on.
- A custom recovery image
You can download this recovery image from here this zip file contains all files to deploy the custom recovery image on your phone. I will guide you throught the process once you read further.
- A custom rom
This will be the new hearth of your phone, it will beat a little faster, it will tick a little smoother etc etc. For this howto guide we are using the modaco custom rom, made by developers at xda-developers.
Step by step
Ok to start installing the custom rom you need a way to get on the phone, well like you see on prerequisite 3 you needed a custom recovery image. With this image your able to install custom roms from the phone, it will install the rom from the SD card of the device. Lets download the recovery image zip file from the provided link if you havent already done that. Then after the download do the following
- Connect your phone to your PC with the USB cable.
- Goto Settings > Applications > Development and check the USB debugging.
- Unzip the the zip file to a location thats easily accesible from the command line, it will work alot easier that way. For our example we unzipped the package to “c:customrecovery”
- In this package there is a file called “adb-windows” this command line executable will connect to your phone and is able to give your shell access.
- Execute the following commands (each line is a new command, wait after each command and look at your phone):
adb-windows shell reboot bootloader
fastboot-windows boot recovery-RA-hero-v1.2.3.img
install-recovery-gsm-windows.bat
Well that was easy right? The custom recovery image is installed. Why was this needed you may ask? Well thats simple, now you can reboot your phone into recovery mode which let you install the custom rom from a beautiful menu.
Now we want the custom rom to be placed on the SD card of the phone. To do so we must stay connected too the PC with the USB cable and mounted. You got that option on your phones event list. After its mounted drag the modaco custom rom zip file to the SD card.
Ok once that is done your ready for the big stuff read carefully.
- Shut down the phone
- Start the phone and hold the home button
- The custom recovery mode will boot up (a nice green screen with options)
- I always make a backup of the system if something goes wrong, this recovery rom gives you this option with the Nandroid option (pretty awesome)
- The best way, and maybe required is the Wipe. Just do the wipe before you update the rom. Once you installed this custom rom you dont need to do a wipe anymore, you can just update the custom rom to a new version.
- Select the option to install from a zip file (not the update.zip)
- Select the modaco custom rom zip file
- It will guide you through the process
Bam! This will take a little while, after the process is done it will ask for a reboot, once rebooted you have the new ROM in place! Yippie! You can check the xda-developers forums for any updates on this ROM!
