Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Samsun Galaxy Nexus broken Power button solution

If you have a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, you're bound to have problems with its power button. People who root their phones find a way around it but it can be a real problem if you're stuck on the black screen of death! The problem can be identified by a black screen with no response from the power button, not even while entering fastboot.
I encountered such a phone and found a solution for the problem. Here's what you do:

1. Take out the battery.
2. Connect the phone via USB to a computer.
3. When you hear the computer beeping, reinsert the battery.
4. When the charging sign appears, take out the battery again.
5. If the charging sign starts to flicker, reinsert the battery.
6. The phone will reboot.

If at first it doesn't boot, repeatedly take out and reinsert the battery while you see the charging sign, till the phone reboots.

Hope this helps, let me know of any queries!

Saturday, January 11, 2014

How to root, S-OFF and upgrade HTC Sensation XL

I just had my hands on an HTC Sensation XL and boy it is really hard to root. After a lot of hard work, I finally brought it down to a few simple steps. Here's a tutorial for those needing to root the device. Briefly, it consists of these steps:

1. Unlock bootloader from htcdev.com
2. Install recovery
3. Root
4. S-OFF

1. How to unlock HTC Sensation XL bootloader:
This is the simplest step. It is very easily guided by the HTC's official development website, htcdev.com. Simply go to the website and it will guide you through the entire process. If you have any trouble, ask me.

2. Install recovery:
Once you have unlocked the bootloader, it's time to install the recovery. Download the latest touch recovery from clockworkmod.com/rommanager for "Runnymede". Once downloaded, flash it using the fastboot tools. For example, if the recovery is named runnymede.img, the file has to be placed in the tools folder, the phone should be in fastboot mode and your command should be:
  • fastboot flash recovery runnymede.img
This will install the recovery

3. How to root HTC Sensation XL
To root the device, download this file, extract it and run runme.

4. How to S-OFF HTC Sensation XL
To enable S-OFF, you need to download this file and place the hboot file in the adb tools folder. Then, use the following commands to enable S-OFF:

  • adb push hboot_7230ddr2_Runnymede_6.28.6666.nb0 /data/local/tmp/hboot_7230ddr2_Runnymede_6.28.6666.nb0
  • adb shell
  • dd if=/data/local/tmp/hboot_7230ddr2_Runnymede_6.28.6666.nb0 of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p18
  • exit
  • adb reboot bootloader
Once this is done, install any compatible ICS RUU from androidruu.com to get hboot 1.28. This hboot is compatible for most custom ROMs.

Congratulations, you're all set to install any custom ROM on your HTC Sensation XL with S-OFF!