Wednesday, January 27, 2010

My Droid is Overclocked....Here's How I Did It.

(DRAFT POST - This is not totally nailed down yet....but I think all the basics are here)

In this post I'll go over the :
  • Background
  • My Starting Point
  • Detailed steps with descriptions
  • Raw Steps By Step
Background

Wow, it was quite a ride. I rooted my Droid a while ago, I was forced into it in order to get full control of the Droid thru my computer using Screencast. This app allows you to view the screen of your phone on your computer. I had to root the Droid in order to get full control using the PC mouse and keyboard.

But that's not what this post is about.....I read this postDroid is stable at 800MHz. Nuff said . This REALLY excited me because my Droid as been feeling a bit sluggish lately. So I decided to give it a try. 3 days later....I finally have it. It was NOT EASY AT ALL. This is one of those situations where the web is the double edged sword....I never would have found this without the web, but the 10,000 posts and articles I had to read to finally get this running was tough....tough!

To be perfectly honest...I'm not really sure about the steps. Maybe I can get an expert to take a look at this post and verify it.

The starting point is: (I'm not kidding...you have to do all this...before you even START THINKING about any of this stuff.

We start with


1. Rooted Droid. Go Here for an article...there are 1000's out there.
2. With adb. You may as well go get the Android SDK, it includes adb and you will use it.
3. I would put all your stuff on your computer near your root drive...you going to be going in and out of the command window and cd-ing around....it's just easier if you're near your root drive. All my stuff is in c:\android\root\
4. With BusyBox. You're gonna need to have BusyBox installed on the Droid. Try Here ... but I swear, this was one took a while.
5.
ADB into windows/system32/

Detailed Steps

Here's Where I Went Today to get over the hump.

  1. Do a Nandroid Backup : in case things go horribly wrong
  2. Load SP Recovery: Puts the phone in a state to load overclock image
  3. Load the Overclock Image: because it makes the phone better
  4. Configure SetCPU on the phone: to conserve the CPU and battery.
2 & 3 need to be done successively.

OK...here are some details of the steps.

1. Do a NanDroid Backup
This is basically so you have a CHANCE of getting the phone back to where you started if things go horribly wrong. This was a tough one...it took a full day of searching to find out how to really do it right.

I searched HIGH AND LOW...tried probably 15 different "step by steps"

This is the one that got it done for me! http://www.sholes.info/2009/12/15/sp-recovery-image-with-nandroid/#more-41


It's the same site that finally got the next step done for me.

2. Looks like you need SP Recovery.
I think this is about getting the right Recovery Boot Screen to come up when you reboot to recovery.....to allow you to install the overclocking image file. This is what I did to get it onto the phone.

Download the following files and place both on your desktop:


Push Files onto Phone
open your command window and cd to where you put the above files.

$ adb push recovery-0.99.2b.img /sdcard/
$ adb push flash_image /sdcard/
Installation:

Move the flash_image binary from the sdcard into /data/local:

adb shell (regardless of OS)
$ dd if=/sdcard/flash_image of=/data/local/flash_image
$ chmod 755 /data/local/flash_image
$ rm /sdcard/flash_image

Now it’s time to flash the image to the recovery partition:

$ su
# /data/local/flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery-0.99.2b.img

Reboot To Recovery Mode

$ adb reboot recovery

The Droid should reboot and show a golden Android logo along with a few menu options in blue near the top of the screen. If you see an icon that looks like “/!\” next to a picture of a Droid, you did not flash the image correctly. Now, you can make a nandroid backup using the GUI.

3. Install Overclocking Image to phone

This was actually the easiest thing...once all the stuff above here was done...the rest went smooth as silk.

reboot recovery

on the phone:
Mount options

Mount system
Mount sdcard

then on pc

adb shell
/system/bin/flash_image boot /sdcard/evilboot950m.img

BINGO


4. SetCPU allows you to control the CPU Speed on the phone.
This allows you to control the CPU speed from the phone. from what i've read, you want to do this to help with battery life on your hopped up Droid.

Go Here to download versions

1.4.4: Adds an "autodetect" option that works on newer kernels (at the bottom of the device selection screen).

NOT THIS DROID! THIS DROID!












The setting to change is the minimum....take it all the way down to










All In One Step By Step

Keep in mind throughout...whenever you are pushing files from your computer to your phone...it's assumed that you are running the adb push command from the directory the files exist. This is why we put it in /windows/system32.....so we can run adb from anywhere.

1. Download the following files and put them on your computer where you want to do your work:

Don't forget to get the Overclock Image you want....I chose 8.
NanDroid Backup

2. $ wget http://sp.sholes.info/recovery-0.10.1.img
3. $ wget http://sp.sholes.info/ramdisk_extras.tar
4. $ wget http://sp.sholes.info/flash_image
5. $ adb push recovery-0.10.1.img /sdcard/
6. $ adb push ramdisk_extras.tar /sdcard/
7. $ adb push flash_image /sdcard/

Then, move the flash_image binary from the sdcard into /data/local:

8.  $ adb shell
9. $ dd if=/sdcard/flash_image of=/data/local/flash_image
10. $ chmod 755 /data/local/flash_image
11. $ rm /sdcard/flash_image

Now it’s time to flash the image to the recovery partition:

12. $ su
13. # /data/local/flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery-0.10.1.img

Now, if you want to keep this recovery image installed,

14. # mount -o remount,rw /dev/null /system
15. # mv /system/recovery-from-boot.p /system/recovery-from-boot.p.bak
16. # mv /system/etc/install-recovery.sh /system/etc/install-recovery.sh.bak

Now, you can reboot your phone into recovery mode.

17. $ adb reboot recovery

The Droid should reboot and show a golden Android logo .

18 . # nandroid-mobile.sh --backup

Push Overclock Image onto the SDCard at it's root...not is a subdirectory.

19. $ adb push overclockimage.img /sdcard/

change the name of the above overclockimage to whatever your file is named.

Load Recovery 099 onto the phone.

Push Files onto Phone
open your command window and cd to where you put the above files.

20. $ adb push recovery-0.99.2b.img /sdcard/
21. $ adb push flash_image /sdcard/
Move the flash_image binary from the sdcard into /data/local:
22. adb shell
23. $ dd if=/sdcard/flash_image of=/data/local/flash_image
24. $ chmod 755 /data/local/flash_image
25. $ rm /sdcard/flash_image

Now it’s time to flash the image to the recovery partition:

26. $ su
27. # /data/local/flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery-0.99.2b.img

Reboot To Recovery Mode

28. $ adb reboot recovery

The Droid should reboot and show a golden Android logo

Load Overclock Image

On the Phone

29. Mount the SD Card
30. Mount the System

On the PC

31. ADB shell flash_image boot /sdcard/boot.img

boot.img above is whatever overclock img you have on the phone.

On the Phone....Configure SetCPU

32. Start program
30. Select Device (remember...it's the bottom)
31. Restart the program
32. Congifure Low frequency

You're pretty much done.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

just wondering the 'droid' u are talking about, is it motorola milestone?