August 2010

First I read the wiki entry http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php?title=Full_Update_Guide_-_Motorola_Droid As I was reading I noticed that there were no directions for OSX; only for Windows and Linux. It turns out that the flash recovery tools are not available for OSX. That means that I would have to do this from a virtual machine.

Because I am more comfortable with Linux I decided to use Ubuntu running in a virtual machine. I grabbed a copy of VMWare Fusion from http://downloads.vmware.com/ I then grabbed a copy of Ubuntu from http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download I had use VMWare with Windows before so I knew this couldn’t be that difficult but I skimmed http://svenand.blogdrive.com/archive/56.html just in case there might be any gotchas.

Once VMWare was installed and a copy of Ubuntu was up and running I began down the path described in the wiki page noted above. Unfortunately I ran into problems in section entitledInstalling SPRecovery with sbf_flash (Linux).Steps 1-5 worked without a problem. However, during step 6 the process for me looked like this

root@ubuntu:/tmp# ./sbf_flash SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf
SBF FLASH 1.08 (mbm)

Index[1]: Unexpected chip 16
Index[2]: Unexpected chip 16
=== SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf ===
00: RDL03 0x80500000-0x8054CFFF FE66 AP
01:  CG35 0xC0680000-0xC08E37FF ABCB AP
02:  CG47 0xC0A00000-0xC0D5C7FF 02C0 AP

Droid found.
 >> uploading RDL03
Uploading: 100% OK
 >> verifying ramloader
 -- OK
 >> executing ramloader
 >> waiting for phone:

…and there it would sit. I tried this a couple of times each time with the same result.

The few pages that google returned didn’t quite get me there and then I noticed something strange in the VMWare window. The USB button at the bottom of the window was grayed out where before it was black:

I clicked on the button and started again.

This time, when the waiting for phone: appeared I clicked the USB button to enable USB and the process completed.

root@ubuntu:/tmp# ./sbf_flash SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf
SBF FLASH 1.08 (mbm)

Index[1]: Unexpected chip 16
Index[2]: Unexpected chip 16
=== SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf ===
00: RDL03 0x80500000-0x8054CFFF FE66 AP
01:  CG35 0xC0680000-0xC08E37FF ABCB AP
02:  CG47 0xC0A00000-0xC0D5C7FF 02C0 AP

Droid found.
 >> uploading RDL03
Uploading: 100% OK
 >> verifying ramloader
 -- OK
 >> executing ramloader
 >> waiting for phone: Droid found.
 >> sending erase
 >> uploading CG35
Uploading: 100% OK
 >> uploading CG47
Uploading: 100% OK
 >> verifying CG35
 -- OK
 >> verifying CG47
 -- OK
 >> rebooting
root@ubuntu:/tmp#

Note above where waiting for phone: is shown is where the USB button turned gray. When I clicked the USB button is where Droid found. appeared and the rest of the output followed.