Rooting HTC Wildfire and installing Cyanogenmod

There are many guides out there, this is a diary of events and some errors you might run into and resolutions which worked for me.

Phone Model HTC Wildfire A3333 running on Android 2.2.1 (Froyo)

Began with HBOOT 1.01.0002

Note: To find your HBOOT version -

Switch the phone off, then hold the volume down button and while holding press the power button. At the top of the screen it will show the HBOOT version. To exit this screen, press the power button to select fastboot and then use the volume down to select reboot.
The One-click guide given at http://www.brighthub.com/mobile/htc/articles/100819.aspx did not work initially.

It ran successfully up to step 11 out of 11, when running Revolutionary it gets to a screen on the tool with the message stuck at "Waiting for device"

So I had to do this the older way downgrading to HBOOT 1.01.0001 followed by switching the phone to S-OFF mode

The complete guide which works for me is this one

http://www.aritrasen.com/2011/09/17/how-to-root-htc-wildfire-2-2-1-and-install-cyanogenmod/


Further errors that appear along the way and their solutions:

1. Revolutionary stuck at "Waiting for device"

The solution which worked after consulting various forums, was to install latest version of HTC Sync on the PC and then uninstall it, leaving the HTC Drivers on the PC.

Under Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs you should see the HTC drivers shown in the image below.



2. After this it proceeds to the point where Revolutionary says "Waiting for root"

This takes forever and does nothing.

Of course this is because I thought one of the steps was optional - that of downgrading from Froyo(2.2.1) to Eclair(2.1). Turns out, I do need to do that - once that is done, Revolutionary goes ahead and gives the Success message.


3. After that you can install Cyanogenmod. Ensure you install 7.1.0.1 and not 7.1.0.

7.1.0 is buggy and as soon as the phone reboots, it gives a "Force Close" message with no status / notification bar. It also does not show any incoming phone calls - you can hear the ringtone but there is not way to accept the call.

All of this is fixed in 7.1.0.1 which is downloadable as update-cm-7.1.0.1-buzz-signed.zip

After that, surprise surprise, there's no GMail, Market or Maps. These are not part of Cyanogenmod. These are available as a separate zip from http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Latest_Version/Google_Apps.

I used gapps-gb-20110828-signed.zip for Wildfire but still had to install Google Maps separately from the Market.

After this, I uninstalled some of the apps I didnt want to use in the Cyanogenmod ROM.

A list of what is safe to remove and what is not is given at the

Cyanogenmod wiki at http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/wiki/Barebones

Follow the instructions and play around with it.

I later upgraded to CM 7.2 using this ROM from here

For those used to HTC's Predictive Dialer, the native CM one kind of sucks. Use the Touchpal Contacts smart dialer app from the Market. http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=817128

With 7.2 I've seen my battery charges quicker than before (with HTC ROM) and the interface is much quicker too.

Dont' forget to add some Lockscreen Gestures

More cool things to do are here

Additional reference links:

http://androidforums.com/wildfire-tips-tricks/348619-easy-ways-improve-htc-wildfire-speed.html

http://androidforums.com/wildfire-all-things-root/459656-what-do-when-rooted.html


http://unrevoked.com/rootwiki/doku.php/public/adb_in_recovery