Friday, January 28, 2011

Samsung Captivate on AT&T: How to revert to stock 2.1 (Eclair)

As with all of my posts, this information is provided   solely for my own reference -- use at your own risk.  I encourage you to do more research before taking any action.


The standard disclaimer about me not being responsible for bricking your phone or voiding your warranty is hereby given.  It is my understanding that you void the warranty on your phone by taking any one of the steps described below -- even if you eventually flash back to your carrier's stock ROM and/or unroot.


Reverting is relatively simple, but it may be time consuming depending on how much stuff you need to restore.  And how cheap you are.


How to root
http://www.xda-developers.com/android/one-click-root-for-att-captivate/
This app now has one-click unroot as well -- I've not tried it though.
Note: you may have to connect to your PC in Samsung Kies mode initially to avoid an error around a missing SD card.


How to enable side-loading
http://briefmobile.com/enable-captivate-app-sideloading
Just note: 
  1. When you want to use adb to access the SD card, turn off USB storage mode (not debug!) on the phone
  2. If you have issues where "cp" or "copy" are not found, you need to open BusyBox to complete the install on your phone
I found that "mv" didn't work as I'd hoped it would:
mv /sdcard/settings.db /dbdata/databases/com.android.providers.settings 
failed with the message '/sdcard/settings.db' - Cross-device link


How to back up apps using titanium
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cryu8bFXLJQ


How to revert using odin1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDtxnH4lFuk


How to restore apps using Titanium (same as back up, but about halfway through the video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cryu8bFXLJQ


It took several minutes for me to revert using , but all of my apps and data loaded.  Mostly this is great for me because I don't need to re-log in to apps that access sites.  It is especially nice since my corporate mail/calendar app setup is quite involved.


Thoughts on reverting
The only reason I reverted was due to issues my Froyo (2.2) ROM (Cappy_Ginger_Clone_Final_R5.zip) developed with WiFi.  So I didn't really enjoy reverting, but I'm glad it worked so well.  


In fact, reverting it seemed to solve the issue I was having where all my Gmail contacts showed -- not just the ones in the My Contacts group in Gmail.  (In my 2.2 ROM this worked fine, probably because the AT&T app wasn't controlling my contacts.)  Unfortunately I cannot assign contacts custom ringtones.  And it's back to the bloatware.


Linpack is showing just over 6 mflops, where I was getting just over 8 with my ROM.  But I just can't have WiFi flaking out.  So I'll try another.  


Reverting is relatively simple, but time consuming depending on how much stuff you need to restore, and how cheap you are (I think Titanium Pro allows you to skip confirmation for each individual app).


UPDATE: I had an issue (bricked phone) when I tried to get an OTA update after reverting to my carrier's stock ROM, so beware of doing the same...

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