More reflections on upgrading . . .

[terrykrueger]

This is primarily for those of you who REALLY want to change your ROM, but fear is stopping you. I was one of those until last week. The lust for GPS made me try it.

General
There are a lot of posts out there telling you how to do it. Many have conflicting info (what you need to do, what order etc) so I just grabbed one and went with it. The easy guide to upgrading found here did not work for me. Also, I think all are a 'bit' incomplete - I mean we aren't tech writers (well some of us probably are). With that said - all are helpful - read them all. Thanks to those that have written them I wouldn't even be able to soft reset without them

So here is my experience.
1. Flashing
I read that if you use the 3.16 Sprint you can just start with that. Mine would not do it - said I had the wrong device so I had to use Olipro's bootloader. I finally know what a tricolor screen is now
I think this would not work because I have an xv6800 and it was looking for a mogul. So I then did the radio prior to the os. This went smooth.
Then, like everyone says it locked up on the Verizon screen so I did the camera power soft thing to get it to bootload again and started the OS.
Little hint - Olipro's tells you to disconnect the USB then reconnect. You need to do this at this point too, but I did not find that in instructions.

2. Activating
Being so afraid of losing my info, I created an AVI of all of the EPST settings. Here is what I noticed: The A-key was empty (or at least it looked empty) and there were a heck of a lot of fields that changed. As an example there were multiple formats of my phone number like (424) 555 1234 would show up in multiple fields as 300014245551234 and4245551234 and 5551234 etc etc. I changed all of these to the original setting and left the A-key blank. I tried to activate with ##228 (yes I know its **22 and kept getting messages from Verizon. Big time user error (its always the little things) so I finally called Verizon. Here is where it gets messy. There was an A-key - it blanks out once entered. I entered it and did the **228 but there is another very important thing. For me, my company pays for service. They wouldn't give me the A-key until I gave them the last four digits of the FEIN #. What a pita! So you may want to have that handy. THe funny thing is when I called back with the FEIN # they didn't ask for it - just gave me the A-key.

3. Aftershocks
Well all went well - no issues too big to handle without a search of this forum. I have reduced RAM but I have GPS. The normal issues are occuring with a custom ROM- conflicts - memory leaks etc,but these are not an effect of the process, just the fact that someone else built this and included it how they liked (Nexvision) and now I am piling on top of that.
Would I do it again?
For the additional functionality? Maybe
For the hacking passion? Definitely

This is my experience - I hope yours is as good or better. Not everyone has success, I am not sure why, I just know it worked for me ymmv.

[Geckotek]

Well said Terry. One thing of note is that most of the directions here are skewed toward Sprint.

It would be helpful if you shared with us your EPST changes. Perhaps posting screenshots with your number made generic?

Thanks!!