Hey guys, I have seen so many people having troubles (myself included) trying to grasp the concepts of flashing a custom rom. I still am no expert by any means, but I think that very fact helps this situation. to all the experts out there, if I list something that is out of place/blatantly wrong please let me know so I can fix it.
Note: Make sure you backup all contacts and information you want to keep before you upgrade your rom as you will lose all of that information if you dont.
THIS GUIDE IS INTENDED TO OUTLINE THE STEPS IN SIMPLE LANGUAGE IT IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A DETAILED END ALL BE ALL IF YOU BREAK YOUR PHONE YOU DID SO AT YOUR OWN RISK AND I WILL NOT BE HELD LIABLE
First off you will need the latest SPL (or boot loader) on your phone, you can get that from these forums quite easily.
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=9093 contains the one you install via a pc (olipro 2.40) but many seem to like the new one no2chem created which allows you to reload the stock SPL. Currently I use this one(nueSPL), it is MUCH easier to use, but be warned, you will have to format a micro sd card to fat 32 before it will work. if you have lots of nice stuff on your sd card, back it up before doing this.
http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=30561 This one (nueSPL 2.47) can be installed like a normal cab file, so it would be much easier.
So now you have a stock phone with a different bootloader, are you excited yet?! If not you should be. The next step is to download the latest leaked sprint rom. this is the exe file that does the rom flashing for you. If you have not run it on your phone yet do so now. just connect your phone, wait a couple seconds and run the exe. the wizard will guide you through the process. Congrats you now have the latest radio on your phone and windows 6.1. make sure you save that exe file you will need it again at the next step.
After you have the latest radio on your phone, now its time for the (mildly) tricky part. make sure you have winrar installed on your computer. if you dont have it you can download it from
www.winrar.com. This is not technically freeware but, if you can deal with a couple nag screens it is effectively free, though if you continue to use it, I reccomend supporting the developers by purchasing it. Turbofool also lists 7zip which is free, but I personally like how winrar is laid out. once you have that(winrar or 7zip) installed, open that exe with winrar or 7zip (right click the file and click open with winrar) and you will see alot of files. make a new folder on your desktop and extract all of those files into your new folder. there will be a file called RUU_signed.nbh this file contains the actual rom for your phone. This will be your RUU folder many other posts reference.
Now that you have this folder with all of these files you are almost home free!!! Find whichever custom rom file from here the ftp is
ftp://up.ppcgeeks.com/Titan/users/ from there select the person that created the rom you would like to try no2chem makes a great rom, but he goes for the minimalist approach, and you will have to find cab files for many of the applications you like, this is good if you want your phone to run as fast as possible and you dont mind installing a few cabs after you get your phone up and running.
But I digress. download one of the roms which will most likely be a .rar file once its on your computer unrar the file and you will get a file that could be named RUU_signed.nbh or anythingelse.nbh if it is not named RUU_signed.nbh rename it to RUU_signed.nbh and then copy that file into the folder you created. now this is important, make sure you overwrite the original RUU_signed.nbh file that was in there, in fact you might be better off deleting the RUU_signed.nbh file from the folder and then copying the new rom file into the folder.
This is the fun part. connect your phone to your pc again and click on the file RomUpdateUtility.exe. if you followed my steps correctly you will be greeted with the wizard you used to upgrade your phone before. Just follow the steps and your phone will update.
An alternate method to installing the custom roms after you have the latest radio and boot loader would be to have a micro SD card formatted to the fat32 file system. at this point put the nbh file on the card in its root directory (in no folders) and name the file TITAIMG.nbh. once this is done hold the power button and camera button while using the stylus to softreset the phone, this will bring it into boot loader mode and will update the rom. Not all sd cards seem to be compatible with this method, so if you have issues just use the method above. If you do a search for a program called pocketrar, you can download the roms directly to your phone and try updating them without having to connect to your pc. otherwise, you will need to active sync the file over, and as we know if you have vista that can be a major issue. though for some reason the RUU folder method can still seem to see the phone usually.
YOUR PHONE WILL FREEZE WHEN IT TRIES TO TURN ON AFTER THE UPDATE, to solve this all you need to do is pull the battery and put it back in and you will be good to go.
Congrats!! you now have yourself a custom rom, if you save the folder you created, from this point on you just need to put a new RUU_signed.nbh file into that folder and run the RomUpdateUtility.exe to change to a different one, play with them, as many roms are quite different and will suit different users.