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HOWTO Install Any Droid 2 ROM on your R2-D2 Droid 2 (and keep the R2-D2 theme bits)
My girlfriend just got an R2D2 Droid 2 for Christmas, and after months of hacking my Droid 1, we decided we needed some 1337 ROMage for her phone as well. This has proven to be a bit of a challenge, but after some good cognac we decided to embark on this adventure, and this guide will chronicle our exploits.
WARNING: The Best of R2D2 App may no longer work after you've done this. Everything else can be restored, but you've been warned that this guide isn't 100%. Also, I didn't keep track of the Vader photo widget. jjq224 is figuring out how to restore it. Read here and here.
Here's the battle plan:
1) Root R2D2
2) Save our R2D2 Apps and Live Wallpapers
-------------------POINT OF NO RETURN-------------------------------
3) Bootstrap and flash the 2.3.0 firmware (maybe 3.0.0)
4) Root again (If you need to?)
5) Install a 2.3.0 ROM (maybe 3.0.0 rom) (We choose fission)
6) Restore everything we saved in step 2
We cataloged all the software customizations that come with the R2D2 Droid 2 and this is what we came up with:
R2 Lock Screen
6 Live Wallpapers
15 Static Wallpapers
R2-D2 clock
ESB app
Best of R2D2 app
Sounds/Notifications
R2 Boot-up
EDIT: I forgot about the Vader photo widget, didn't keep track of it, and don't know how to restore it. If you continue, you'll lose it. If you know how to restore it, please post here and I'll add your instructions to the post.
EDIT: 9/18/11 Someone pointed out that the default portrait for a contact without a portrait is c3po. I missed this and didn't keep track of where it was kept, so no idea how to get that back.
Our goal is to restore ALL of these after we've installed some other ROM.
1) Root Your Astromech:
We used this thread to use DORoot.bat to root the R2D2 Droid 2.
It's pretty straightforward, ask somewhere else if it doesn't work.
2) If you use mingaldrichgan's boot animation mod package (see step 6) you can skip everything here except getting the backgrounds from BlurHome.apk and backing up The Best of R2D2 with Titanium Backup.
I was hoping to use Titanium Backup to snag all the Star Wars stuff, but alas, Titanium Backup only saves the settings of system apps and not the app itself.
But since we have root privileges, we can just snag the apks which contain our custom theming ourselves. You can use whatever file manager you want, but I used Astro File Manager. You can download it from the Market. If you want to skip this step, or you've already deleted all this stuff on your phone, you can get most of it back from the internet; check out the post below this one to learn about that (and what things are missing).
After you've rooted, download Astro file manager (or any root capable file manager) and copy some apk's out of /system/app. I used the "Send" option that you get when you long tap a file, and then sent them to Dropbox, you can try the email option, or whatever's available in your file manager (or copy them to your /sdcard). Just put them somewhere that won't get wiped when you install a ROM.
You need to grab all of these:
r2d2clock.apk
Asteroids.apk (this is the 3D Millennium Falcon wallpaper)
StarWarsESB_asteroids.apk
StarWarsESB_Binoculars.apk (this is the AT-AT Binoculars app)
StarWarsESB_lightspeed.apk
StarWarsESB_R2D2.apk
StarwarsESB_spaceslug.apk
swipe.apk (this is the The Empire Strikes Back live wallpaper, not Swype)
To save all 15 static wallpapers, also grab:
BlurHome.apk
Inside BlurHome.apk (it's a zip file, just rename it and open it on your PC or something) and go into:
\res\drawable-hdpi\
and copy out the wallpaper jpegs that are there. This is all 15 wallpapers, not just the 14 that were leaked (if you want to save the trouble, just download 14 from the link below).
If the ROM you're downloading doesn't have Swype and you want to keep it, go ahead and grab swype.apk while you're in there.
If you want to save The Best of R2D2 app, download Titanium Backup from the market and backup that apps. (The app isn't available from the market or on the internet as far as I can tell, so you can't redownload it if you don't get your own backup).
Best of R2D2 is actually just a movie player. The movie is in:
/system/media/video/startupvideo_en.3gp
So grab that while you're there.
FYI, your Boot animation and audio are in /system/media, you can snag those if you want, but it's easier to just install the leaked package. We checked and all the R2D2 sounds are in the leaked package, but the other non-R2 sounds aren't (but they may come with your ROM anyway).
3) SBF to 2.3.20 (or 3.0.0??)
dancedroidMAKE SURE YOUR BATTERY IS FULLY CHARGED BEFORE STARTING THIS STEPdancedroid
(We learned the hard way that even though your droid is plugged in, it's battery isn't charging)
For whatever odd reason, the R2D2 firmware is numbered 2.4.5, even though it's about the same version as the Droid 2's 2.2.0 firmware. The Droid 2 2.3.20 firmware is actually newer than 2.4.5 (which came with the R2D2). From what I hear, none of the Droid 2 2.2.0 based ROMs will run on an R2D2 Droid 2, so just give that idea up. However, if we "downgrade" our firmware to 2.3.0 (remember this "downgrade" is actually an upgrade) then we can run all the 2.3.0 based ROMs. Great! Lets do that!
In theory, we could also switch to the 3.0.0 firmware, but as of the time of writing, 3.0.0 seems a bit unstable and there aren't any interesting ROMs for it. I'll stay away from the alpha software, but if you're reading this a few months into 2011, you probably want to check out 3.0.0.
So back to our plan to run 2.3.0. There's a pretty big hitch. As a general rule, you can't SBL older versions of the firmware over newer versions. Remember, 2.3.0 still counts as newer than 2.4.5. That means we can switch our R2D2 Droid over to the Droid 2 firmware, but we can't come back. Once you cross this rubicon, your R2D2 is just a Droid 2 with a case mod.
However, as of the time of this writing, you CAN SBL 2.3.0 over 3.0.0, so if you want to try 3.0.0 and you don't like it (or your brick your astromech), you can restore to the 2.3.0 SBL.
I'm using the instructions here:
Tutorial/Walkthrough for flashing an .sbf to Droid 2 (unrooting/factory restore) - xda-developers
And firmware 2.3.20.
The summary goes like this:
Install RSD Lite
Charge Your Phone Battery To Full
Put the phone in bootload mode
Use RSD Lite to flash with the sbf you downloaded
Reactivate your phone with *22899
Maybe wipe cache and data (we didn't)
Maybe factory reset (I forget if we did)
In reality, I had some trouble with RSD Lite, and had to rename my file according to this post:
RSD lite Failed flashing process - Android Forums
How that guy figured out that you need to add or remove characters from your sbf filepath until the log file looks right, I don't know, but cheers to him!
4) Check to see if you have root by looking for the Superuser App. We had lost root at this point, so we fought around with z4root and DOroot.bat until we had root again. You should be able to just go back to step 1 and do that over again if you don't have root at this point, if you still have root, go on to step 5.
5) You should now be able to install any ROM based on 2.3.0. Fission and Squidley's are both an option, but there are probably others. Look through the author's changelog to see what their ROM is based on.
We used Fission, cause it has that nice easy mode installer and it went great. We got it from here:
Fission Rom Manager | Team DeFuse
Read somewhere else on how to install fission, it should go just like a normal Droid 2 install. Or install whatever 2.3.0 based ROM you want. Google is your friend.
6) Restore stuff
R2-D2 Lock Screen
To get the R2D2 Lock Screen, you'll need to install metamorph and follow the instructions from here:
MetaMorph ? Droid-X ? StarWars Lock Screen – droidpirate.com
We had some problems getting MetaMorph to run, but we clicked around and eventually it worked. I'm not sure what we did to fix it, click the market, hold home to launch it from the recently used apps. Try running it a few times until it behaves.
After that Metamorph is easy to use.
If you're running a ROM that uses a wheel to unlock instead of a slider (like Fission 2.5.5), the R2D2 lockscreen won't work.
Sounds, Live Wallpapers, and Boot-up Sequence
Rather than move all of the sounds over from your previous install (they're in /system/media on a new R2), we can just download all the sounds and the boot-up sequence from the 'net and use a convenient installer.
You can find a guide for doing this here:
StarWars R2D2: Bootanimation and Sounds pack
But mingaldrichgan put together a package that contains ALL the live wallpapers, sounds, best of R2D2 movie and the boot animation. You can save yourself the trouble of doing the next two steps if you use his file instead:
http://www.amazming.com/files/R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip
If you want to get rid of the boot sound rename /system/media/d2_r2d2_pu.ogg to /system/media/d2_r2d2_pu.ogg.bak to disable the startup sound (and vice versa to enable it).
Live Wallpapers
If you used mingaldrichgan's R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip you don't need to do this section.
To get the live wallpapers back, just install the apks with Astro File Manager (from the market) or any other apk installer. We downloaded them from Dropbox and tapped them to open the installer. Click through until it's done.
When we went to install Astroids.apk (the 3d Millennium Falcon lwp) and swipe.apk (The Empire Strikes Back slideshow lwp), they wouldn't install because they're odexed. If you deodex they will install. Or you can grab them from Angdroid's Star Wars ROM: http://www.droidforums.net/forum/dr...tars-wars-no-star-wars-clean-super-clean.html, but they're also included in mingaldrichgan's modified bootanimation package. Using that will be your easiest bet.
If you figure out how to get those live wallpapers to install, please send me the solution and I'll change this post.
R2-D2 Clock Widget and ESB Binoculars
If you used mingaldrichgan's R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip you don't need to do this section.
While you're there, go ahead and install the r2d2_clock.apk and the ESB Binoculars apk if you want the clock or binoculars.
Static Wallpapers
The easiest way to restore the static wallpapers is to just copy them anywhere on your /sdcard. I don't think you need the small versions for anything. The wallpaper picker will read all the images on your sdcard and give them to you as options in your gallery.
There's a cryptic way to hack them back into the wallpaper section, but it's too much trouble to be worth it for a single phone.
Best of R2D2 App
Finally to get the Best of R2D2 app back, restore it from Titanium Backup. The app is actually just a video player that loads a movie from /system/media/video/startupvideo_en.3gp.
If you used mingaldrichgan's R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip you already have startupvideo_en.3gp in the right place, but if you didn't, copy startupvideo_en.3gp to /system/media/video/startupvideo_en.3gp. This is the system partition, so it's mounted read only. You'll have to use rootexplorer or remount /system as read/write.
This step may not work.
dancedroid:icon_ banana:You're done!:icon_ banana:dancedroid
Credits
I stood on the shoulders of giants making this guide. Super special thanks to everybody I linked to, particularly Koush, DarkOnion, and Team Defuse, Team Black Hat! Also, great thanks to mingaldrichgan for making the modified boot animation package! And flash-log spelunker guy. Over half the information in this post was gleaned from hours reading forum posts, so there's too many names to thank the collective wisdom of the Android hacking community. Shout out to Pete Alfonso of Bugless Beast too, for making the best Droid 1 mod!
And to my awesome girlfriend for being the coolest geek girl I've ever met! I know ya'll are jealous that this was her idea.
Good (slightly more up to date) discussion here:
http://www.mydroidworld.com/forums/droid-2-discussion/7572-droid-r2d2-rooted-gingerbread.html
If you're glad I've made this guide, tell your friends to read my webcomic:
If you want to suggest updates for this guide, please PM me, I'll gladly edit changes in.
My girlfriend just got an R2D2 Droid 2 for Christmas, and after months of hacking my Droid 1, we decided we needed some 1337 ROMage for her phone as well. This has proven to be a bit of a challenge, but after some good cognac we decided to embark on this adventure, and this guide will chronicle our exploits.
WARNING: The Best of R2D2 App may no longer work after you've done this. Everything else can be restored, but you've been warned that this guide isn't 100%. Also, I didn't keep track of the Vader photo widget. jjq224 is figuring out how to restore it. Read here and here.
Here's the battle plan:
1) Root R2D2
2) Save our R2D2 Apps and Live Wallpapers
-------------------POINT OF NO RETURN-------------------------------
3) Bootstrap and flash the 2.3.0 firmware (maybe 3.0.0)
4) Root again (If you need to?)
5) Install a 2.3.0 ROM (maybe 3.0.0 rom) (We choose fission)
6) Restore everything we saved in step 2
We cataloged all the software customizations that come with the R2D2 Droid 2 and this is what we came up with:
R2 Lock Screen
6 Live Wallpapers
15 Static Wallpapers
R2-D2 clock
ESB app
Best of R2D2 app
Sounds/Notifications
R2 Boot-up
EDIT: I forgot about the Vader photo widget, didn't keep track of it, and don't know how to restore it. If you continue, you'll lose it. If you know how to restore it, please post here and I'll add your instructions to the post.
EDIT: 9/18/11 Someone pointed out that the default portrait for a contact without a portrait is c3po. I missed this and didn't keep track of where it was kept, so no idea how to get that back.
Our goal is to restore ALL of these after we've installed some other ROM.
1) Root Your Astromech:
We used this thread to use DORoot.bat to root the R2D2 Droid 2.
It's pretty straightforward, ask somewhere else if it doesn't work.
2) If you use mingaldrichgan's boot animation mod package (see step 6) you can skip everything here except getting the backgrounds from BlurHome.apk and backing up The Best of R2D2 with Titanium Backup.
I was hoping to use Titanium Backup to snag all the Star Wars stuff, but alas, Titanium Backup only saves the settings of system apps and not the app itself.
But since we have root privileges, we can just snag the apks which contain our custom theming ourselves. You can use whatever file manager you want, but I used Astro File Manager. You can download it from the Market. If you want to skip this step, or you've already deleted all this stuff on your phone, you can get most of it back from the internet; check out the post below this one to learn about that (and what things are missing).
After you've rooted, download Astro file manager (or any root capable file manager) and copy some apk's out of /system/app. I used the "Send" option that you get when you long tap a file, and then sent them to Dropbox, you can try the email option, or whatever's available in your file manager (or copy them to your /sdcard). Just put them somewhere that won't get wiped when you install a ROM.
You need to grab all of these:
r2d2clock.apk
Asteroids.apk (this is the 3D Millennium Falcon wallpaper)
StarWarsESB_asteroids.apk
StarWarsESB_Binoculars.apk (this is the AT-AT Binoculars app)
StarWarsESB_lightspeed.apk
StarWarsESB_R2D2.apk
StarwarsESB_spaceslug.apk
swipe.apk (this is the The Empire Strikes Back live wallpaper, not Swype)
To save all 15 static wallpapers, also grab:
BlurHome.apk
Inside BlurHome.apk (it's a zip file, just rename it and open it on your PC or something) and go into:
\res\drawable-hdpi\
and copy out the wallpaper jpegs that are there. This is all 15 wallpapers, not just the 14 that were leaked (if you want to save the trouble, just download 14 from the link below).
If the ROM you're downloading doesn't have Swype and you want to keep it, go ahead and grab swype.apk while you're in there.
If you want to save The Best of R2D2 app, download Titanium Backup from the market and backup that apps. (The app isn't available from the market or on the internet as far as I can tell, so you can't redownload it if you don't get your own backup).
Best of R2D2 is actually just a movie player. The movie is in:
/system/media/video/startupvideo_en.3gp
So grab that while you're there.
FYI, your Boot animation and audio are in /system/media, you can snag those if you want, but it's easier to just install the leaked package. We checked and all the R2D2 sounds are in the leaked package, but the other non-R2 sounds aren't (but they may come with your ROM anyway).
3) SBF to 2.3.20 (or 3.0.0??)
dancedroidMAKE SURE YOUR BATTERY IS FULLY CHARGED BEFORE STARTING THIS STEPdancedroid
(We learned the hard way that even though your droid is plugged in, it's battery isn't charging)
For whatever odd reason, the R2D2 firmware is numbered 2.4.5, even though it's about the same version as the Droid 2's 2.2.0 firmware. The Droid 2 2.3.20 firmware is actually newer than 2.4.5 (which came with the R2D2). From what I hear, none of the Droid 2 2.2.0 based ROMs will run on an R2D2 Droid 2, so just give that idea up. However, if we "downgrade" our firmware to 2.3.0 (remember this "downgrade" is actually an upgrade) then we can run all the 2.3.0 based ROMs. Great! Lets do that!
In theory, we could also switch to the 3.0.0 firmware, but as of the time of writing, 3.0.0 seems a bit unstable and there aren't any interesting ROMs for it. I'll stay away from the alpha software, but if you're reading this a few months into 2011, you probably want to check out 3.0.0.
So back to our plan to run 2.3.0. There's a pretty big hitch. As a general rule, you can't SBL older versions of the firmware over newer versions. Remember, 2.3.0 still counts as newer than 2.4.5. That means we can switch our R2D2 Droid over to the Droid 2 firmware, but we can't come back. Once you cross this rubicon, your R2D2 is just a Droid 2 with a case mod.
However, as of the time of this writing, you CAN SBL 2.3.0 over 3.0.0, so if you want to try 3.0.0 and you don't like it (or your brick your astromech), you can restore to the 2.3.0 SBL.
I'm using the instructions here:
Tutorial/Walkthrough for flashing an .sbf to Droid 2 (unrooting/factory restore) - xda-developers
And firmware 2.3.20.
The summary goes like this:
Install RSD Lite
Charge Your Phone Battery To Full
Put the phone in bootload mode
Use RSD Lite to flash with the sbf you downloaded
Reactivate your phone with *22899
Maybe wipe cache and data (we didn't)
Maybe factory reset (I forget if we did)
In reality, I had some trouble with RSD Lite, and had to rename my file according to this post:
RSD lite Failed flashing process - Android Forums
How that guy figured out that you need to add or remove characters from your sbf filepath until the log file looks right, I don't know, but cheers to him!
4) Check to see if you have root by looking for the Superuser App. We had lost root at this point, so we fought around with z4root and DOroot.bat until we had root again. You should be able to just go back to step 1 and do that over again if you don't have root at this point, if you still have root, go on to step 5.
5) You should now be able to install any ROM based on 2.3.0. Fission and Squidley's are both an option, but there are probably others. Look through the author's changelog to see what their ROM is based on.
We used Fission, cause it has that nice easy mode installer and it went great. We got it from here:
Fission Rom Manager | Team DeFuse
Read somewhere else on how to install fission, it should go just like a normal Droid 2 install. Or install whatever 2.3.0 based ROM you want. Google is your friend.
6) Restore stuff
R2-D2 Lock Screen
To get the R2D2 Lock Screen, you'll need to install metamorph and follow the instructions from here:
MetaMorph ? Droid-X ? StarWars Lock Screen – droidpirate.com
We had some problems getting MetaMorph to run, but we clicked around and eventually it worked. I'm not sure what we did to fix it, click the market, hold home to launch it from the recently used apps. Try running it a few times until it behaves.
After that Metamorph is easy to use.
If you're running a ROM that uses a wheel to unlock instead of a slider (like Fission 2.5.5), the R2D2 lockscreen won't work.
Sounds, Live Wallpapers, and Boot-up Sequence
Rather than move all of the sounds over from your previous install (they're in /system/media on a new R2), we can just download all the sounds and the boot-up sequence from the 'net and use a convenient installer.
You can find a guide for doing this here:
StarWars R2D2: Bootanimation and Sounds pack
But mingaldrichgan put together a package that contains ALL the live wallpapers, sounds, best of R2D2 movie and the boot animation. You can save yourself the trouble of doing the next two steps if you use his file instead:
http://www.amazming.com/files/R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip
If you want to get rid of the boot sound rename /system/media/d2_r2d2_pu.ogg to /system/media/d2_r2d2_pu.ogg.bak to disable the startup sound (and vice versa to enable it).
Live Wallpapers
If you used mingaldrichgan's R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip you don't need to do this section.
To get the live wallpapers back, just install the apks with Astro File Manager (from the market) or any other apk installer. We downloaded them from Dropbox and tapped them to open the installer. Click through until it's done.
When we went to install Astroids.apk (the 3d Millennium Falcon lwp) and swipe.apk (The Empire Strikes Back slideshow lwp), they wouldn't install because they're odexed. If you deodex they will install. Or you can grab them from Angdroid's Star Wars ROM: http://www.droidforums.net/forum/dr...tars-wars-no-star-wars-clean-super-clean.html, but they're also included in mingaldrichgan's modified bootanimation package. Using that will be your easiest bet.
If you figure out how to get those live wallpapers to install, please send me the solution and I'll change this post.
R2-D2 Clock Widget and ESB Binoculars
If you used mingaldrichgan's R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip you don't need to do this section.
While you're there, go ahead and install the r2d2_clock.apk and the ESB Binoculars apk if you want the clock or binoculars.
Static Wallpapers
The easiest way to restore the static wallpapers is to just copy them anywhere on your /sdcard. I don't think you need the small versions for anything. The wallpaper picker will read all the images on your sdcard and give them to you as options in your gallery.
There's a cryptic way to hack them back into the wallpaper section, but it's too much trouble to be worth it for a single phone.
Best of R2D2 App
Finally to get the Best of R2D2 app back, restore it from Titanium Backup. The app is actually just a video player that loads a movie from /system/media/video/startupvideo_en.3gp.
If you used mingaldrichgan's R2D2-bootanimationmod.zip you already have startupvideo_en.3gp in the right place, but if you didn't, copy startupvideo_en.3gp to /system/media/video/startupvideo_en.3gp. This is the system partition, so it's mounted read only. You'll have to use rootexplorer or remount /system as read/write.
This step may not work.
dancedroid:icon_ banana:You're done!:icon_ banana:dancedroid
Credits
I stood on the shoulders of giants making this guide. Super special thanks to everybody I linked to, particularly Koush, DarkOnion, and Team Defuse, Team Black Hat! Also, great thanks to mingaldrichgan for making the modified boot animation package! And flash-log spelunker guy. Over half the information in this post was gleaned from hours reading forum posts, so there's too many names to thank the collective wisdom of the Android hacking community. Shout out to Pete Alfonso of Bugless Beast too, for making the best Droid 1 mod!
And to my awesome girlfriend for being the coolest geek girl I've ever met! I know ya'll are jealous that this was her idea.
Good (slightly more up to date) discussion here:
http://www.mydroidworld.com/forums/droid-2-discussion/7572-droid-r2d2-rooted-gingerbread.html
If you're glad I've made this guide, tell your friends to read my webcomic:
If you want to suggest updates for this guide, please PM me, I'll gladly edit changes in.
