An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

Hello everyone.

I've been following the thread regarding putting Rev-A and GPS on the vogue and have noticed people having problems due to either not following the directions explicitly *tsk tsk shame on you* or having driver/compatibility issues during the flashing process.

I wrote about an alternative way of flashing your device. One that protects you from having to deal with the alltel customization of death and ruu_upgrade crashing causing bricks.

I encourage you to give it a read if you are looking for an alternative method of getting rev-a/gps on your device.

You will need to gather a few files and you will need to have activesync working for the intial flash. Thankfully installing cokeman is pretty failsafe and won't result in any bricks for the most part.

I will try my best to guide you through the process step by step.

Before you begin please make sure you meet the following requirements.

1. You have activesync installed
2. You have a MicroSD card 128MB or larger available (preferably a spare)
3. You understand the risks of flashing your device and are prepared to do so.
4. You take a moment to read this thread http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=24979 and get an understanding of the original method of flashing and the reasons you will be going through the various steps.

I originally posted this on the thread above but it's gotten lost in the thread and sure enough people are still bricking their devices by not explicitly following instructions.

Ok....Now that we got that out of the way let me start by giving a shoutout to dharvey4651 for providing me with the original guide as described in the link above. dharvey4651's tutorial opened up the ability to put rev-a and gps on my device.

Also, i'd like to give a shoutout to JD for his efforts in being a step ahead of our respective carriers when it comes to bringing the latest and greatest to our dated devices.

Ok you ready?

Let's get started!

1. Download the cokeman installer. http://rapidshare.com/files/11019074...r_MFG_2.31.exe
2. Connect your device via activesync and run Vogue_unlocker_MFG_2.31.exe. Carefully read the instructions and follow them to a tee. It's a real easy step but still it will be your most dangerous step in this tutorial so just follow the instructions.

Once you complete step two you're phone should say 2.31 coke as the spl when it reboots. You can check this by holding the power and camera buttons down then do a soft reset while holding these buttons down. The rainbow screen should say 2.31 coke. If it doesn't. Reboot your phone and repeat step 2 again until it displays 2.31 coke.

If you're phone says 2.31 coke pat yourself on your back you just completed the hardest part of the tutorial.

Moving on........

3. Download and install winrar. www.rarsoft.com You want the version for windows ;)
4. Download the alltel flash upgrade file. Save it to your desktop.
5. Download Jd's GPS 2.1 Rom and save it to your desktop.
6. Place your microsd card into your computer and open up your card. If this is your primary card back up the contents and store it on your hard drive.
7. Format your microsd card by right clicking it in windows explorer. Select FAT32 as the format type this will wipe your card and format it clean.
8. Open your microsd drive in explorer by double clicking the appropriate drive leter. It should be empty
9. Right click RUU_Vogue_4350_ALLTEL_WWE_3.04.671.2_Radio_4350H_3 .37.10_Alltel_NV2.00_PRL30008_0331_Ship_withSpecia lNBH.exe and select open with winrar you will see a bunch of files in the archive. move your mouse over the file called VOGUIMG.NBH and hold your left mouse button. Now while holding your left mouse button, Drag the VOGUIMG.NBH file from winrar onto your MICROSD explorer window. (you may need to reposition the two windows so you can drag from one to the other. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT VOGUIMG.NBH and NOT ***special_4350_for_alltel.nbh***
10. You should now have one file named VOGUIMG.NBH on your MicroSD card. Once this file is copied. Remove the card and place it in your phone.
11. Make sure you're phone is charged and connected to the outlet before flashing. While holding the power and camera buttons. Soft reset your phone. It should boot up in boot loader mode with a rainbow screen. Shortly after you should see a Grey box with the word Loading.... on the screen. If you do not see this then 1. you did not install cokeman properly, 2. you did not format the card as FAT32 or 3. you do not have the VOGUIMG.NBH file in the root of the SD card.
12. If all goes well it should ask you if you want to flash the file. It should also say CDMA in the update box. If you just see OS then you did not select the right NBH file from the alltel rom. You need the CDMA update to enable rev-a/gps. When it asks if you want to flash the file, press the button as requested. (on my phone it's power)
13. Wait 4-5 minutes till it completes. It will say Press Power or Enter to reboot. Do not reset. Leave it as is for now. Continue to the next step.
14. Remove the SD card. Place it back in your computer.
15. Open up the SD card on your PC. You should have the VOGUIMG.NBH in the root of the card. Delete this file.
16. Right click the gpstest21 rom you downloaded and click open with winrar.
17. Find the NBH rom file. (every rom varies in name but what you are looking for is a file that ends with .NBH and is generally around 64+Megabytes. Drag this .nbh file to the root of your sd card like you did in step 9.
18. Go back to your SD card. You will find the NBH file there. Rename this file to VOGUIMG.NBH <--just make it all caps cause it's how I did it and I can verify that it just works.
19. Place the SD card back into your device.
20. Repeat Step 11 to put the phone in bootloader mode.
21. Press power/enter when instructed to do so. This time instead of updating the OS/CDMA/etc you are just gonna be updating the OS
22. Press power/enter after the flash is complete.
23. Enjoy Rev-A and GPS.

I know this is a lot of steps but please understand i'm trying to guide you as clearly as I possibly can. If for any reason you want to go back to sprints original rom. Just download the original sprint rom from here. and repeat steps 17-22 but replace the .nbh file with the one you find in the original sprint rom.

This also applies for other custom roms you want to experiment with.

No driver issues, no activesync problems, no updates crashing etc. It's a little more work but think of it as insurance.

I hope this was of help! if you have any questions or are lost please let me know and i'll help to the best of my abilities.

it's 1:42am so bear with me if you find typo's or something just doesn't make sense.

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

very detailed. so you can revert back to the original sprint rom after updating radio, using cokemans sbl 2.31? and not have any problems?

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

WOW- exactly what I was wondering! Actually I was wondering if I could revert to no2chem's 6.1 update which was very vanilla/Sprint like but with 6.1. Not that I don't appreciate the hard work of many customizers, I just prefer to select what things I put on my phone which may not fit in with what others use.

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

This walkthough is great i have never been a fan of doing anything through active sync so i say the less the better, now that i got my phone back from the store ima do this tonight, now if only i can figure out any reason i would want to put the titan radio on my device.


I am like that also becuase i do know exactly the programs i am gonna want to use, however i usually start with a custom rom becuase the creator usually applies numorous registry edits, which is extremely conveinient

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

i'm running OMJs wm6.0 RevA/GPS rom and it has been flawless for a week now. no crashes. i highly recommend it. its in his FTP directory.

there's no APGS (like all the current roms) so gps lock takes about 1-5 minutes initially. no GPS priming is needed, just works. click google maps or windows live search, and wait. sometimes windows live search times out, just tell it to "get gps position" again and it'll lock . turn by turn works great as well.

ftp://up.ppcgeeks.com/Vogue/Users/OM....WM6.0.GPS.exe

its actually more stable than the ALLTEL rom itself.

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

so while i was updateing the VOGUIMG.NBH from the all tell rom i got a error message said update failed so it terminated. i continued and flashed the jd gps next but when i booted up it said no radio detected. any reason you know why i would get the error message during the flash of the alltell rom.

i have reflashed the stock rom for now

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

I think it's good to clarify for people that it must be a MicroSD card it CANNOT be a MicroSDHC card. So it probably should read 128mb to 1gb (I forget at what size they become SDHC cards it might be 2gb). Use the 512mb MicroSD card that came with your phone and you should be fine. Very good instructions though. I've been using the memory card upgrade technique for a while since I'm running Vista x64, but all the RUUs run with x64 now except for the unlockers. Sometimes it'll fail, but you just do it again and you're fine. As long as a SPL update doesn't fail you're ok.

Remember whatever Rom you use has to be a rom for the 3.xx radios. So if it's a rom you used before upgrading to the new Radio it WILL load, but it WON'T actually boot. If you loaded a pre 3.xx radio rom you'll be fine because you can use this method to load another rom without the phone being able to boot.

You need to reinstall the AllTel rom. If it failed it didn't finish. You need to do the alltel step again. One other safe way to update to the alltel rom once you've done the 2.31 unlocker is to take your memory card out, boot up to the rainbow screen plug in your USB cord, and now your phone should say USB at the bottom instead of Serial. At this point you can just run the Alltel update and it will detect the phone and upgrade.

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

Thanks for the info.

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

One thing I noticed with windows is that when you are copying a large file to a removable storage device. The copy will often say it was completed before it was actually completed due to the way windows caches some of the data.

What I usually do is copy the file over. Once it says completed I wait 10-20 seconds before pulling the card out because the access light often still flashing on my pc. Once it becomes solid. I give it a 5 second wait then pull out the card.

I hope this is of help.

P.S

You can you use the steps 17-22 to flash the titan radio rom too. You do not need to downgrade/upgrade the coke spl. Just leave it at 2.31.

Mahalo and aloha.

Re: An safer alternative way to get Rev-A/GPS
 

Great tutorial. Thanks. It helped me get it done right the first time! :)