This is log of what happened as I installed cyanogenmod onto my UK HTC Magic Android phone. It basically all went fine and now I can run android-2.1 without waiting eons for an official update.

My thanks go to all the developers responsible for making this work. They have done a great job.

Fortunately for me the UK HTC Magic supports fastboot which simplifies matters greatly by allowing me to boot any image downloaded from my PC over the USB cable. So we can get the AmonRA image running to get things going.

Update session

Boot to the fastboot screen by holding Back and pressing Power.
Put in clean 2GB sdcard with:

  • DRC83_base_defanged.zip
  • update-cm-5.0.7-DS-signed.zip
  • RA170G.img (recovery-RA-sapphire-v1.7.0G.img)
Booted phone to fastboot screen.
fastboot boot recovery-RA-sapphire-v1.7.0G.img
Selected Nandroid+ext and performed backup.
Returned 'Error : Run 'nandroid-mobile.sh' via adb!'
So adb shell (yields a root shell)
/sbin/nandroid-mobile.sh --backup
dumped boot.img, recovery.img, misc.img, system.img, data.img, cache.img to nandroid folder, generated md5sums and unmounted system, data, sdcard and says it was successful.

Rebooted and fastbooted again after copying the nadroid files to PC.
adb push recovery-RA-sapphire-v1.7.0G.img /sdcard/RA170G.img
(note, this is NOT the actual Sdcard location as its not mounted yet)
adb shell flash_image recovery /sdcard/RA170G.img
Rebooted the new recovery image by holding Home while booting. Worked!.

Now factory wiped.
flash zip DRC83_base_defanged.zip
flashed zip update-cm-5.0.7-DS-signed.zip
All completed ok.
Rebooted using menu item. Immediately got buzz + vodaphone screen.
After one minute got cyanogen's animated boot graphic.
A couple more minutes and I have the cyanogen screen.
The new firmware is running ok but is missing all the google apps and the market.

It seems the directions I had were not quite right - we now have to either extract our own google application images and make our own image or our own overlay update.zip. Someone has provided one though so in the meantime we can overlay this.

Rebooted to recovery screen and installed gapps-ds-ERE36B-signed.zip.

Now we have a proper googley phone.

I previously saved a number of apps to sdcard using Astro and I can now reinstall them using 'adb install'. Everything is working!

Restoring application data

The factory wipe removes all saved data except that on the sdcard. A number of application can let you save their own data to the sdcard. Astro lets you save applications to the card. Astrid can export its tasks. You can download "SMS Backup & Restore" to preserve your SMS messages if you care about those.