How I rooted and flashed my HTC Magic

I rooted and flashed my HTC Magic (previously 1.5 with Sense UI) to Android 2.2 (Froyo) in a few simple steps. No need for goldcards, nor changing of Radios nor SPLs. It’s the easiest and quickest method to flashing your phone. All in all, it took me less than 15 minutes and that includes the flashing of the new ROM. This is for HTC Magic 32A running Android 1.5 with Sense UI. I have not tested this on any other version. I installed the FuseBox Froyo ROM

Disclaimer: This will void your warranty. Do this at your own risk. I am not responsible if your phone does not work after following this guide.

My phone’s info is the following:

hboot - 1.76.0009 (Perfect SPL)
cpld - 12
radio - 6.35.08.29

Even though I have the perfect SPL, I did not need to install any other SPL, namely the ENG ones. I also did not need to upgrade my Radio.

Here are the steps to Root your phone:

• Make sure your phone’s options are set so that USB Debugging is enabled. You can do this by going to Settings, Applications -> Development and then selecting the USB Debugging option.
• Download and install the Universal Androot tool from the Android Market. If you don’t want to download it from the Android Market, you can get it off the net and then just copy it to your SD card. That’s what I did.
• Run the Universal Androot tool. Choose the option that reads, “Superuser for Android 1.5/1.6”, then click Root. It will take a few seconds and if successful, should state that your phone was successfully rooted. If for some reason it fails, try it again. If it then still fails, choose the option - “Do not install Superuser”. It should then work. Otherwise, retry the steps until it works. Persistence breaks down resistance
• Done. You are rooted

Once you are rooted, you can do a number of things. You can install a custom recovery, which I would recommend and you can also install custom ROMs. I installed the Recovery-RA-hero-v1.6.2 custom recovery. Steps to install a custom recovery is below. You will need a custom recovery to create a backup of your current ROM and it’s useful to flash new ROMs (otherwise you will need to use adb to flash new ROMs).
If your Radio starts with 3.22 or less, you will need recovery-RA-sapphire-v1.7.0H. If your Radio starts with 6.35, you will need Recovery-RA-hero-v1.6.2. You can get these off the net or the XDA forum. Note that you don’t need to use these, but they are just about the latest ones around and mostly used.

Steps to flash a custom recovery:

• Make sure you have the Android SDK installed and the adb drivers before attempting this. Please read midkemia’s guide for info get the Android drivers and ADB working. I hope you don’t mind me linking your link in here, midkemia Once you have ADB working, you can continue.
• Copy the custom recovery to the root of your SD card.
• Open the command prompt and type “adb shell”
• Type “su”. At this point, you need to look at your phone. If the Superuser app is asking for permissions, then just push "allow" and make sure that the "remember" option is checked.
• Type “cd /system/bin”
• Type “ls /system/bin/flash_image recovery /sdcard/xxxxxxxx.img” (where the xxxxxxxx is replaced by the name of the recovery image you copied to your SD card) You should probably just copy and paste this code into the adb shell.
o I got an error when doing this (File not found, even though the file was on the SD card), so I use the fastboot commands, which worked. The equivalent fastboot command is: “flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery-RA-hero-v1.6.2.img” or whichever recovery you copied to your SD card. This worked for me. This also needs to be done in the adb shell.
• You should now have a custom recovery installed. You can check if it works by turning off your phone and then when you turn it back on, hold the Home and Power key for a few seconds until the custom recovery screen pops up. Now you can do your Nandroid backups, partition your SD card and flash new ROMs etc.

Flashing a custom ROM:

• You’ll need a USB/SD card reader for this.
• Reboot your phone and press the Home and Power keys together until the custom recovery comes up.
• Go the Wipe menu. Select all of those options. Do all the wipes.
• Partition your SD card with the ext option
• Take out the SD card, attach it to your PC via the USB/SD card reader and copy the custom ROM to the root of the SD card, then put the SD card back into your phone.
• Reboot your phone again. Get into the recovery menu again and choose “Flash zip from SD card”. If you encounter an error that it cannot mount the SD card, go to the main menu of the custom recovery and choose the “USB-MS” option. Enable that, then disable it and go back to the option to flash the zip from the SD card. It should work.
• It will then flash the new ROM. Remember when installing new ROMs to wipe all info unless otherwise specified.
• Have fun

Credits to mumilover on the xda forum for his thread and midkemia for his blog guide.

Let me know if I have missed anything here and I will update.

thanks for this!

Gonna try this on my Tattoo running 1.6.... wanting to change to 2.1 or 2.2 but dont wanna make a gold card. Thanks.

i have a little bit of a problem...

when i download and extract the android sdk it just extracts all the files to my desktop. i then ran sdksetup and it downloaded a whole lot of stuff. when it was done i looked on the c: as was mentioned but could not find the android sdk folder...

a little confused...

FoRmFacTor said:

i have a little bit of a problem...

when i download and extract the android sdk it just extracts all the files to my desktop. i then ran sdksetup and it downloaded a whole lot of stuff. when it was done i looked on the c: as was mentioned but could not find the android sdk folder...

a little confused...

Click to expand...

You need to move the folder to the C:\ yourself Try and set up the folder structure as in the guides. C:\AndroidSDK

Thanks

I moved it.

Having some trouble with the adb serial number step but will play around with it tonight and see of I can get it working

FoRmFacTor said:

Thanks

I moved it.

Having some trouble with the adb serial number step but will play around with it tonight and see of I can get it working

Click to expand...

Make sure you have the correct drivers installed. You can check midkemia's guide for more info

i think i see the problem.

the guide said it does not work through a win 7 machine...

will wait and do it on a xp machine

should hopefully work then.

FoRmFacTor said:

i think i see the problem.

the guide said it does not work through a win 7 machine...

will wait and do it on a xp machine

should hopefully work then.

Click to expand...

That's only for the RUU and goldcard, which is not needed for the guide I set up.
The method I used works with Windows 7. I have the 32 bit version.

mmm...

still having a problem.

it is not with your guide but with trying to get the "adb devices" part of the other guide working.

i downloaded the sdk.

unzipped it.

copied the extracted file to c:

opened the sdk.

downloaded the usb drivers.

installed my HTC magic with those drivers. It was installed as a ADB composite device.

put in the path under system variables as noted in the guide.

when i run the cmd prompt it gets to the point where the output is "C:\AndroidSDK>" but when i type in adb devices or adb shell it comes back with ADB IS NOT A RECOGNIZED INTERNAL OR EXTERNAL COMMAND or something along those lines.

I think i am just too stupid to do this

Make sure you have the exact folder structure. The USB drivers should be placed in the "usb_driver" folder, which is in the Tools folder, which itself is located in the AndroidSDK folder. So your folder structure for the drivers should be, "C:\AndroidSDK\tools\usb_driver".

thanks

still no luck.

dam you android sdk and you moron brother, usb_drives!!

oh well

think i am going to pay someone who has done this before to do it for me...

Here's a video on how to set up ADB - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UF5w1dKe2U&feature=grec_index

thanks got adb working but could not get the fastboot command working to flash the recoery...

it kept on giving me a fail: not allow error.

the other method kept on giving me a File not found error.

i managed to get another version of the amon recovery working but when it booted into the recovery it only stayed on for a few seconds before rebooting back to the standard rom.

then i gave up...