Rooting and updating a Samsung Galaxy S I-896 (Rogers)
Warning: The following involves major interventions into the operating system of your computing device. If things go wrong, you may end up destroying your device, voiding your warranty, and who knows what else. If you cannot afford to destroy your device, stop now.
These notes are intended for my own use and they are not intended as a recommendation for others as to any course of action. I also make no warranties as to the effectiveness or currency of these steps. These are personal notes that worked for me when they were written on my device. I can’t guarantee them under any other circumstances and can’t help you if you end up with a different result.
Always backup before trying to hack anything.
Seriously: pay attention to the above warnings.
These are the steps I took to root, update, and unlock my phone. There are various methods out there, but I found this one worked for me.
- I backed up everything I could think of to my SD Card (everything is available in the market, and all of them work more or less the same way and automatically):
- APNs (intenet protocol info) using APN Backup and Restore
- SMS Backup and Restor
- Call Logs Backup and Restore
- general app backup using Astro
- Following the excellent instructions here I rooted my phone.
- note that z4mod takes a scary amount of time to work (3-4 minutes) and it looks like it has seized control of your phone. But in the end it seems to do the job.
- I did seem able to get the SuperOneClick1.7 method to work. I could install the software but nothing seemed to happen—it hung up at a chmod command, suggesting it wasn’t working. Although given how long z4mod took, I was maybe just too impatient.
- Next I used the free version of ROM manager (available in market) to update my android
- Fire-up ROM Manager, go to settings, and then select at the top of the screen “Flash ClorkworkMod Recovery.” You will be asked to identify your phone. Select “Galaxy S Captivate.” See http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/index.php?title=Samsung_Galaxy_S/SGH-I896. Got the ROM file from here Basic instructions on how to use clockworkmod available here
- First time I did it, it looked like everything was set up properly, I followed the instructions, but when it rebooted, I got a “could not find /sdcard/update error” on both clicks. Chose “reboot into system.”
- Finally figured it out (Caution: this is from memory):
- After you’ve Selected the “Flash ClockWorkMod Recovery” select the second option, Reboot into Recovery”
- Phone Reboots
- When you are asked, select find .zip file
- Go to SD Card and find the .zip file you downloaded. You will be given a list of options most of which are no. Select the one that isn’t.
- it’ll reboot again. This time select “from update.zip” It then gives you some garbage and then reboots. It goes quickly through the Rogers screen but takes almost forever at the second Galaxy S screen. But when you are done it is a Froyo phone. The new phone is much faster and has some new apps. It seems to reboot more slowly though.
