Fixing that buggy stock ROM on your CM MagnumHD

My phone's
home pane

For those who are lucky enough to get Cherry Mobile's MagnumHD, we all can agree that the stock ROM f***** sucks. I really mean it sucks - the random restarts, the FCs, context buttons stop responding and the the most annoying is the screen times out (i.e. blacks out) when you make a phone call. So, being a geek, I will have none of this and I started scheming (along with Aryan Limjap which BTW, provides us the lovely images attached to this post) to get a fix into my CM Magnum. Warranty be damn!

System Pane

And what do you know, the Indians Indonesians came up with a better ROM. As you can see I'm now running a Wellcom-A99 ROM on my CM MagnumHD. I can tell you it runs better, cooler and longer. Also I would like to point out the Android version 2.2.2. I will still flash this thing to 2.3 when it comes out. But trust me on this, MY PHONE IS RUNNING BETTER on this ROM.

You might wonder how is this possible, then you apparently didn't inherit enough "bright" genes from your parents. But to get my point moving, CM MagnumHD is OEM phone from Foxconn and is rebranded in a lot of other countries.

• Philippines - CM MagnumHD
• China - Huawei Ideos X6
• US - Viewsonic ViewPad 4
• India Indonesia - Wellcom A99
• India - OliveSmart V-S300

With the Apps

And that is why children, I can stick an Wellcom A99 ROM on my CM MagnumHD. But still want to beat this into your head, if you are doing this you are voiding your phone's warranty. As for me, I already voided mine when I rooted my phone. Refer to the screenshot with the apps.

So if you understand what I am telling you and you still want to flash in the Welcomm ROM then click here. Just scroll down and look for the link. The download is about 200MB. 

And btw, did I mention to you all that there's still a slight chance that this will put your phone into a boot-loop or (worse) brick your phone?

Edit: Mecha50 corrected me that the A99 ROM is Indonesian. My bad.

Void your warranty and root your CM Magnum HD at the same time

This is basically a repost of Takahiro Sonogi's post over at PHAC. He posted a way to root your Cherry Mobile Magnum HD which is also known as Viewsonic ViewPad 4 and Huawei Ideos X6 (also known as Huawei U9000).

There a lot of reasons to root your Magnum HD, one of them is to void your warranty. The other good reasons are:

1. To install custom ROMs. The problem is just that the device is so brand spanking new that there are no custom roms...yet.
2. To turn it into a target dev device. Which is my reason. It just sucks writing code that needs access to some /system binaries and get cock blocked because its not rooted.
3. Its Friday night and got nothing to do. Ok I made this one up.

In any case, I'm telling you again ROOTING YOUR CM MAGNUM VOIDS THE WARRANTY. I want to be clear about that.

Now if you are one of those Windows GUI babies and doesn't know his way around CMD or DOS you are way over your head. Stop what you are doing because YOU MIGHT BRICK YOUR PHONE AND I WILL LAUGH AT YOU. You heard me, if you screw this one up and blame me, I. WILL. LAUGH. AT. YOU.

If you haven't changed the webpage then download and install the Android SDK.

Here are steps to root your CM Magnum HD

adb devices

1. Take your Magnum and plug it in into your PC and make sure it is recognized by ADB. Run ADB from the command line and type adb devices. If there are no devices, then you need to install something like a USB device driver. There should be on with your phone. Whatever the case you are looking for something like the screen shot on the right;
2. Then download something called rageagainstthecage. Unpack it and put it somewhere where you can get to it from the command line. 
3. Copy the rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin to /data/local/tmp folder on the device:
   

   adb push rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin /data/local/tmp
   adb shell

4. Now do a CHMOD and run it:
   

   chmod 755 /data/local/tmp/rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin
   /data/local/tmp/rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin

5. Get a copy of Superuser (SU) and busybox. Now unpack it. Do the following:
   

   mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
   
   adb push su /system/xbin
   adb push busybox /system/xbin
   adb push Superuser.apk /system/app
   adb shell
   
   chown 0.0 /system/xbin/su
   chmod 6755 /system/xbin/su
   chmod 755 /system/xbin/busybox
   chmod 644 /system/app/Superuser.apk
   
   ln -s /system/xbin/su /system/bin/su

6. Reboot and redo step 1. Once you get your PC to recognize your phone do the last step.



Got root?

7. And for the moment of truth, if you haven't bricked your phone yet, time to see if we really have root access. Refer to the screen shot. You are looking for the "#" symbol. You might have to accept a prompt from your phone.

If you got this far, congratulations. You just voided your phone's warranty and rooted your Magnum HD at the same time.

Woot!