I recently decided that I wanted the increased functionality (and fun) of a fully rooted phone. I was a bit nervous about doing something that could potentially turn my beloved (most of the time) phone into a paperweight but with articles on Lifehacker.com such as “Five Great Reasons to Root Your Android Phone” and “The 10 Best Android Apps that Make Rooting Your Phone Worth the Hassle” tempting me for so long I finally decided to take the plunge.

*Disclaimer: My only intent with this blog post is to document what worked for ME on MY phone at THIS time in case it will be of some use to someone else. I cannot promise that any of this will work for YOU with YOUR phone NOW. Please read over any and all instructions carefully. Plan ahead by backing up all the data on your phone and assuming that this process will take longer and be more difficult than you expected. I also recommend that you double and triple check that your contacts, pictures, etc. are all backed up to your Google account as I lost a few recent contacts during this process. Finally, if you do experience any problems it is highly unlikely that I can help you. I suggest you look on some of the same forums I did and speak to someone more knowledgeable on this subject than me. If all of this has convinced you that rooting sounds too scary to try than you are probably better off not doing it.

Rooting My Phone:

To root my phone my primary resource was the excellent The Unlocker article “How To Root the HTC Incredible 2 (Unrevoked Method)”. My first note at this point is that getting to the Hboot screen was kind of a pain. I kept pressing down and the power button but sometimes it didn’t seem to matter and my phone loaded normally. Just keep trying and you’ll get the feel for it.

Now you will probably notice that you need to downgrade your version of Hboot to 0.98. For that I used this post, and specifically vwhk-12102011-c.zip. For an extremely helpful video of the process nat3mil’s How to Downgrade 2.3.4 - HTC Droid Incredible 2. For some reason when I tried to downgrade using a slightly different process (running the script as administrator rather than the command line) it didn’t work. Follow the video and you should be fine.

I continued to use the Unrevoked method and switched over to the CyanogenMod wiki article “HTC Incredible 2: Full Update Guide” specifically the section called Flashing CyanogenMod. I used the Method via Recovery method.

Everything worked great and I had my phone rooted and running cyanogen!

Ah, but all was not well. Turns out that while my phone is faster and has a ton of great features available the GPS has stopped working. I’d try to get a GPS fix and would get a message that my location was unavailable at this time. Uh oh…

Fixing my GPS:

I looked around the forums again and found a few possible solutions that involved various levels of complexity and risk. This is what I did and it worked.

*Before you do ANYTHING with your shiny new rooted phone BACKUP YOUR PHONE!!! (three exclamation points show you how important this is)

One of the great benefits for a rooted phone is access to great backup utilities like Titanium Backup and the premium version of ROM Manager. Use them now!

1) I installed new radio firmware by following this article on RootzWiki [RADIO] HTC Incredible 2 Radios [PG32IMG.zip] (Updated: 20 Sept 2011). I got the .zip file from here, specifically the 1.09.01.0722 version of PG32IMG.zip.

2) Install GPS Status & Toolbox. Go to Menu > Tools > Manage A-GPS state. 

3) Install GpsFix. Got to Menu > Preferences and make sure it is set for at least 15 minutes. Run the program for a while and see if it can find the satellites.

After doing this for a while it still couldn’t find a lock so I MOVED TO A DIFFERENT ROOM. Suddenly it was able to find a lock (represented by a long line of little Sputniks).

Now my GPS worked! (Hopefully yours will as well)

Public Service Announcement 

(this programming is made possible by users like you)

This process required several programs and apps to make it possible. The reason these exist is that someone put in the time and effort to create them. If you want to continue to have things like this available I strongly recommend that you purchase the premium versions or donate to the organizations.

http://revolutionary.io/ which provided the Unrevoked tool asks for a donation

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/ has a donate button on the bottom right

There are premium versions of:

ROM Manager

Titanium Backup

GPS Status

GpsFix

I am not in any way affiliated with any of these organizations. I just think that if you like something you should show your appreciation by helping to support them. We have cool stuff because someone created it, so let’s encourage people to make more cool stuff.