It wasn’t that long ago that with it’s integrated eFuse chip, the Droid X was thought to be impossible to root. After all, every time you reboot, it would just put stuff back where Motorola/Verizon said it should be. Well, in a certain sense, that is the truth, sort of. It’s in that “sort of” that we find the wiggle room to do an awful lot of things with both the Droid X and the Droid 2. During the post, I will be talking about the Droid X, but essentially every single thing I am going to talk about is done identically regardless of which of the two platforms you have. Because of the eFuse chip, the whole process of “rooting” is not as clean and straight-forward as it is with the Motorola Droid. That being said, both the Droid X and the Droid 2 are so much better base platforms than the original Droid could have ever hoped, that it really doesn’t matter. We are going to look at the three levels of “rooting” that one must go through to have absolute and total control of this device. That we really, truly aren’t going to get to full control (yet) is something to keep in mind. In my opinion, each successive level is a little bit more dangerous, so pay attention please!
Rooting the Droid X
Head on over to XDA-Developers and spend your time looking through the One Click Root process for the DX/D2. What I am going to show you is for the Windows platform, but the same post details how to do it with both Mac and Linux too. Here is a run-down of the process:
- Download the One Click Root application and extract it to your Windows computer. Download here, Ver. 2.1.4: http://www.kimete.com/droid/beta/DoRootWin_2.1.4.zip
- Extract the folder from the DORoot.zip file to your desktop. You should be moving 7 or 8 files into the tools folder. Windows 7? Remember to run the file as Administrator.
- Install Motorola Drivers: http://www.motorola.com/Support/US-E…arging-Drivers
- It doesn’t matter if you have installed the Motorola drivers before. Do it again. The DX/D2 have multiple modes possible when you connect the device via USB to your computer (PC Mode, Windows Media Sync, USB Mass Storage, and Charge Only). Each of these modes, plus the Debug mode (needed for this process) has a separate and distinct driver. ALL OF THEM MUST BE LOADED FOR THIS TO WORK! After you load the drivers, connect with each of the modes and the driver will install.
- (Tip, to stop the launching of the Verizon/Motorola site, go to the MotoConnect icon in the bottom right, right click, when phone connects, nothing.)
- Make sure you phone is in PC Mode with USB Debugging enabled
- PC Mode: Notification blind -> USB connection -> PC Mode
- USB Debugging: Settings -> Applications -> Development -> USB debugging
- You need USB debugging icon showing in notifications. Try Charge Only if you can’t get PC Mode to show USB debugging.
- Double-click and run doroot.bat
- If you get errors or it doesn’t run correctly, you didn’t load ALL the drivers. Go back and do it again.
- Let it run.
- That’s it, you are done. Your phone is rooted. You can verify this by checking to see whether you have the ‘Superuser Permission’ app loaded on your machine.
The same process can be used to remove the root, if you should ever decide to do this. Just run undoroot.bat
How-to video
Many thanks to facelessuser for working his magic! At this point, you can load any of the root-required apps we have previously posted about. And you don’t have to go any further than this, if that is all you need. However, if you want to load alternate themes or over-clock your device you need to do a bit more.
Caution! Caution! Caution!
Removing the Bloatware from Android 2.2 – (3 Ways) Super Easy & Safe, Safe & Easy, Free [Courtesy of DroidXForums]
Disclaimer:
This is at your own risk. I, nor the DroidXforums take any responsibility for any harm this may cause your phone.
(Original Credit to TAYPOTTS and Abe21599 for this thread. Updated for 2.2 OTA and other finds)Note: If you remove bloatware and do not rename as shown you can no longer update your phone-ever!. i.e. when the next update comes out you will have to rename or “unfreeze” all your apps before updating to the next version. If you deleted apps you will have to find them somewhere and reload them. You have been warned. There is no recovery from this. The eFuse chip assures it.
DO NOT REMOVE or RENAME:
- Verizon Backup Assistant
- Blur Files (corp directory, files, voice commands, etc.) until we get a 2.2 SBF File. Note: An SBF file is a full copy of the OS and everything and will make your phone like new again. You CANNOT use the SBF from 2.1 on your OTA 2.2 phone you will “brick” it. We sort of have a 2.2 SBF file, but I don’t personally trust it yet.
Safe to RENAME:
- Amazon Mp3
- City ID
- Skype
- MyVerizon
- CarDock
- Kindle
- Blockbuster
- NFS (you can actually delete this without root or anything just a regular app)
- Verizon Visual Voicemail (if you remove this it WILL disable the Voicemail button on your dialer)
- HelpCenter
- 3G Mobile Hotspot (mynet.apk)
- News
- News and Weather
- Weather
- Android Live Wallpapers
- eMail and Gmail (if you use another mail program like K9)
- Social Networking (If you do not use the internal Facebook, etc. found in accounts)
- VZ Navigator
- Print to Retail
- I am sure I missed some but if they never start and I never see them running who cares
How to:
Very Easiest – buy Titanium Backup for Root and “Freeze” Apps you do not want running. Make sure “Chuck Norris” option is on. No, I am not joking.
Second Easiest – buy Root Explorer app from the Market. This is like the “Files” app on your phone but can see all of the system files, and change any file you see. BE CAREFUL!Open Root Explorer
- Find System and open
- Find app and open
- Click the Mount R/W to change to Mount R/O (in the upper right corner)
- Find the “bloat” app and change the name to .bak
- Example: CityID.apk —> CityID.bak
“Old school” – AKA the “free” way – Terminal mode
- Connect phone to PC (make sure USB Debugging is turned on)
- Open CMD/Terminal
- Navigate to your Tools folder (from your Android SDK)
- Type in “adb shell” you should see a $ sign
- Type in su (this gives you permission)
- Type in the command that relates to the app you want to rename
Example:
If you wanted to rename CityID:
/system/bin/mv /system/app/CityID.apk /system/app/CityID.bak
Some Apps like My Verizon are odd it’s directory is /data/app/com.vzw.hss.myverizon.apk and is also in /system/app/MyVerizon.apk
In other words, you may have to just search around until you find it.
Booting Into Recovery Mode
For many changes you might like to do on the Droid X we need to boot it into recovery mode. If you want to Boot your Droid X in recovery mode, it’s pretty simple to do:
1. Turn off your DX.
2. Press and hold the Home button and then Power button simultaneously until Motorola’s logo appears. (You can also just load one of the root-required Reboot apps and just choose ‘Reboot into Recovery Mode’ from the menu)
3. Release the Power button but continue to hold the Home button until an exclamation mark in a triangle is displayed on the screen.
4. Release the Home button and press the Search button one time.
That’s it! Now your Droid X will enter into recovery mode.
NOTE: Use the volume up and down buttons to till you get the ” reboot system now ” option and press the camera button to choose it.
Once your phone is in recovery mode, you can fix it by reinstalling an approved, un-tampered version of the software. So, the rumors that the phone was difficult to mod were absolutely true, but the rumors that a hardware fix from Motorola would be required to get your phone working again were wrong. No bricking here, people.
Recovery Mode Backups and Restores
As you test out booting into recovery mode, you will immediately notice that there is no option to either Backup or Restore your device. That is blocked by the locked Bootloader. However, leave it to Koush (creator of ROMManager and the ClockworkMod backup) to figure out a way around it. Rather than attempt to describe, I am going to just give you the relevant details direct from his blog:
Droid X Recovery (and Droid 2 too!)
Well, this was a bitch.
Caveats:
This is not a *real* recovery. The way this recovery works is by hijacking portions of your boot process during system initialization and starting into recovery instead. So, if you hose your system *COMPLETELY* you will need to SBF (reload a clean image copy of the ROM). Specifically, if your logwrapper, logwrapper.bin, or hijack binary are missing from /system/bin, you will be screwed.
Do I have to be rooted to run this?
Yes.
So can we now install custom ROMs?
Yes, but you can’t replace the kernel or boot image. But really, once you have access to /system, anything is possible. It will just take a little hackery.
How does this work?
When your device boots up, there is a init.rc script in your boot image that runs various components found in /system. The Droid X recovery bootstrap mimics the “logwrapper” binary. The hijacker then looks for “/data/.recovery_mode”, and if it finds it, it unmounts /system to prevent android from starting. It then starts up recovery instead.
How do I boot into recovery?
You can manually create the /data/.recovery_mode via a terminal file and simply reboot, and you will be in recovery. Or you can use the handy Droid X Recovery Bootstrap application to reboot into recovery.
What if my phone won’t boot? How do I get into recovery without the app?
When the hijacker runs, it will automatically create the “/data/.recovery_mode” file after it finishes. This tells the system that the next time it boots, it should boot into recovery. But, when the system starts, the Droid X Recovery Bootstrap will then delete that file when Android is fully started, to prevent you from booting into recovery. So what does this mean? If you fail to boot, simply pull your battery, and your next boot you will be into recovery (unless your /system is *really* hosed, in which case you need to SBF).
How do I fix my phone if I really mess it up?
Use an SBF. Google it. http://twitter.com/b16a2smith/status/21544626803
Why does the Droid X Recovery Bootstrap start on boot?
As mentioned above, it needs to log that your phone booted successfully and recovery mode is not necessary. It also replaces your “adb daemon” with one that has root permissions, allowing for easier usage of the adb command.
Will this work with ROM Manager?
Yep! But you must run the Bootstrap app and leave it installed.
Is this open source?
Yep.Recovery: http://github.com/koush/android_bootable_recovery
Droid X Bootstrap: http://github.com/koush/DroidXBootstrap
Droid X Hijack: http://github.com/koush/android_vendor_motorola_droidx
OK STOP TALKING, WHERE DO I GET IT?
You can donate and grab it for $2 off the Android Market (search for Droid X Recovery Bootstrap or Droid 2 Recovery Bootstrap), or you can download it for free here: Droid X Recovery Bootstrap Droid 2 Recovery Bootstrap
How to Perform a Backup or Restore
This all gets you to the point where you can do backups and restore. Even at this point, assuming that you have loaded Koush’s Droid X Recovery Bootstrap program, it can get just a little confusing. So, here are the steps to actually do a backup or a restore:
- Run the Droid X Recovery Bootstrap app, and press ‘Bootstrap Recovery’ (wait for it to say OK), then press ‘Reboot Recovery’
- It will take you into the Clockwork Recovery area – this is a crucial thing to get used to if you’re going to play around with your phone.
- Before you do anything else – use the volume buttons to navigate to “backup and restore” – press the camera button to enter that menu
- Select “backup” and press the camera button – it will go through the backing up process, it may take a minute or two or more, don’t battery pull or anything dumb like that
- When it’s finished, it will kick you back to the main menu. Select “reboot system now” and press the camera button to reboot your phone
- You now have a stable backup of your current system saved onto your SDCard. Feel free to backup this backup to your PC, just in case. Anything you do – as long as you can get to clockwork recovery – is reversible back to this point.
Change anything in your system: e.g. delete something off your home screen, a widget, anything
- Go back to Droid X Recovery Bootstrap, Bootstrap Recovery, Reboot Recovery.
- You’re back in clockwork recovery again. Navigate to “backup and restore” – select “Restore” – this is where all your system flashes are kept, you should only have one. Navigate to it, press the camera button. It will ask for confirmation – select “Yes – Restore”
- It will restore your phone, reboot when done, you’re back to your flashed system file – you’ll see the widget you had previously deleted returned to normal.
Power down your phone, reboot, and it will go right back into your regular interface – no clockwork recovery – the reason for this is that in order to boot to the clockwork recovery mode, it checks for a tiny file that basically tells the phone to redirect to recovery mode – on a successful reboot with Droid X Recovery Bootstrap (if you have the .apk installed) it will delete this file on reboot so you don’t boot back into clockworkmod recovery mode unless you want to. I strongly suggest that you install it and just leave it there.
Another note: this is ClockworkMod recovery mode, not Nandroid Recovery Mode. They both work nearly the same, but many feel that the ClockworkMod backup is more complete and has less potential hang-ups. As ClockworkMod Backup was developed by Koush, guess which one his app supports.
How To Manually Deodex Your Rooted Droid X to Allow Custom Themes
This is a guide on manually deodexing your phone. [Credit to PPCGeeks and bignadad] You will need to perform this if you plan on using developer’s alternate themes for Android 2.2+.
Quote:
Deodexed ROMs allow the developer to more easily customize the phone interface.
For example, if you want to change icons or application configuration files, they are not packaged up in a deoxed ROM. This allows them to be edited after the ROM is distributed. You are going to trade off compactness for speed and accessibility. Frankly, this is a very small price to pay with most modern devices.
There are a lot of ROM modifications that can only be flashed over the top of a deoxed ROM. This is because they need to edit the system files that are packaged in a odex ROM. This is where you have to pay attention.
You don’t have to do a clockworkmod backup to flash between odexed and deodexed ROM. But, when you flash a ROM you are basically overwriting the system. A clockworkmod backup is probably overkill, but it will definitely work. The more backups, the better.
What you’ll need:
A Windows based machine
Download xUltimate v2.2.2
Patience
Process:
1. Unzip xUltimate v2.2.2, and launch “Main.exe”
2. If everything goes well xUlt should recognize the phone and make a connection. You now should see a list of options.
3. Run option 1. After option 1 is done, run option 2.
4. Now these well take a while. Run option 3.
5. IMPORTANT: After you have run option 3, you MUST navigate to the xUltimate folder and find “origi_frame” folder, and delete “guava.odex”. It’s a bad file, and interferes with the deodexing process.
6. Now run option 4, and wait.
7. Exit xUltimate, and put the phone in USB mass storage mode.
8. Go back into the xUltimate folder and copy “done_frame”, and “done_app”, and move them to the root of the SDCard.
9. Open a command prompt (in a Root Terminal), and enter the following:
Code:
adb shell su stop mount -o rw,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk1p21 /system cp /sdcard/done_app/* /system/app/ cp /sdcard/done_frame/* /system/framework/ rm /system/app/*.odex rm /system/framework/*.odex mount -o ro,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk1p21 /system reboot
Your phone should now be deodexed!
You may notice an increase in speed, and you now have the ability to edit certain files with greater ease. (i.e. services.jar)
Credits Via Alldroid.net:
Rainabba and Mike919: For initially working with me to get a white clock, and later deodex.
toxman: For testing, and being a huge risk taker.
teenfaces: For letting me use his services.jar
And especially Xeudoxus: For letting me a guinea pig, for xUltimate, and answering my questions. And also for the making the xUltimate tool. It definitely makes things easier.
How Do I Load a New Theme?
Whew. OK. I have gotten this far, what now? Well, again, do your research. Find themes that are made for you particular device and ROM. You are still at the stock 2.2 ROM, so this shouldn’t be too hard. Download the theme you want to load and copy it to the main root directory of your SDCard. It will be in the format of ‘Something.zip’. Follow the same process you did to create a ClockworkMod backup, but this time, choose the option “Install Zip from SDCard”. It will then show you the root directory of your SDCard. Find the Theme file you downloaded and choose it. Scroll down and choose “Yes – Install Something.zip” and then sit back and wait until it says ‘Install Complete’. Then choose Reboot and when your phone comes back up, you should see your new theme.
Overclocking the Droid X
So you’d like to overclock that lovely little machine, oh but Droid X, isn’t that supposed to be impossible to work with in such a way, because of the locked bootloader? Apparently not! The fine folks over at Android Forums have it all whipped up nice and simple for you to get the most from your little piece of multitasker, and they’ve done it in a way that’s not as terrifyingly unapproachable as you might think. Keep in mind that this is NOT a replacement kernel. Almost everyone has been able to go to 1.1 GHz, and others have pushed as high as 1.45 GHz, but it has not been stable. This also gives you the ability to play around with the voltage levels assigned to the machine. The idea is that if you can lower the voltage required to keep the phone alive, you can extend your battery life. Every single phone is different, so you will have to experiment and see what works for you.
Milestone Overclock 1.4.3: *Official* Support for Droid X/2 Froyo
Milestone Overclock as of version 1.4.3 now officially supports Droid X/2 running 2.2/Froyo. Go download it for FREE from the Market. Here is a a post from Tiago from the DroidXForums thread.
Quote:
Hi all, I’m the Milestone Overclock guy. I’d like to let you know that the latest version of Milestone Overclock supports Droid X 2.2 and is now in the Market. It is based on the fix by nadlabak/kabaldan but done “correctly” now that we have the kernel source.
Note also that this fix should correct the vsel problem that many had in android 2.1. The previous module/app simply wasn’t setting vsel at all, as many of you suspected. Let’s hope this version takes care of it, for anyone that didn’t upgrade to 2.2.
For those of you not familiar with Milestone Overclock, it’s the original overclock app for the Motorola Milestone (which has a locked firmware just like the Droid X) but nowadays strives to support all OMAP3 phones, and that includes Droid, Droid X, Droid 2 (working on it), many XT7xx/XT8xx and even a Samsung (Galaxy Beam; others are Hummingbird, not OMAP). And yes, it’s free!
If you’re interested, you can check out the issue which led to this release in the project site:
Issue 36 – milestone-overclock – Modify Source to Support Droid X. – Project Hosting on Google Code
(many thanks to tekahuna)
Thanks
Tiago Sousa aka mirage
Side Note:
The Milestone Overclock kernel module is at the core of all other Droid X/2 overclocking “apps”. I’d prefer to call them “Alternate User Interfaces” or “Skins” to the Milestone Overclock kernel module. If you appreciate the ability to overclock your Droid X/2, please Donate to Tiago!
Instructions:
Download Milestone Overclock from the Market, and give it a whirl.
The app is geared towards providing the basics, in a safe manner. It has brick protection, where if you happen to input a custom setting that is out of spec, and causes you to bootloop, you can pull your sdcard and get into your phone to clear the settings…
Full control of freq/vsel still requires a setscaling.sh script (that’s how the cool folks like to do it anyways). Pull that from the original zip file. I’ll update that when I get a chance.
You can also try one of the alternate apps in the Market that use the same engine, but wrap more UI around it: Example Droid X/2 Overclock. I personally think this is the best of the bunch. It costs $.99, but I think it is entirely worth it. It is pictured above.
You can, of course, use setCPU with this too.
Original Post:
Quote:
Milestone Overclock Module 1.2t (nadlabak’s patch) w/ Memory Locations for DroidX 2.2 Added by FreeWELL
Credits:
Tiago Sousa aka Mirage: for The Milestone Overclock Project
nadlabak: for patching in Froyo/2.2 Support
FreeWELL: for finding DroidX 2.2 memory locations/module compilation
Notes:
I’m trying to keep this as close as possible to the way it was done on 2.1. For me, 2.2 seems to need a little more voltage to be stable than it was under 2.1. I’ve included two versions of setscaling.sh to start from.
setscaling.sh is set to stock voltages/clock speed
setscaling100.sh is set to stock voltages w/100mhz bump across the board to 400/700/900/1100 (This appears to be stable for me, and is the baseline for my testing/tuning)
Install Instructions
adb/terminal:
$ su
# cd /sdcard/extracted/droidx_22_oc (or wherever you extracted the files to)
# mount -o rw,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mcblk1p21 /system
# cp overclock.ko /system/lib/modules/overclock.ko
# cp setscaling.sh /system/xbin/setscaling.sh
# chmod 644 /system/lib/modules/overclock.ko
# chmod 755 /system/xbin/setscaling.sh
<optional(only do after thoroughly testing what works for your DroidX in setscaling.sh)>
# cp install-recovery.sh /system/etc/install-recovery.sh
# chmod 755 /system/etc/install-recovery.sh
</optional>
# mount -o ro,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mcblk1p21 /system
Run Instructions
adb/terminal:
$ su
# insmod /system/lib/modules/overclock.ko
# setscaling.sh
download the files: droidx_22_oc.zip
Conclusion
This probably all seems quite overwhelming. In a sense, it is. But you can do it a step at a time. It doesn’t all have to be done at once. Try a step and live with it. See how you like it. Study a bit. Study some more. Read forums. Get comfortable with taking the next step, gather your resources, and then take the plunge. I really believe that you will be like me, and enjoy the independence it brings to know what you phone is doing and have a much greater control over how it works. Let me know how this goes for you. Enjoy!!
