A few people now have been tweeting and facebook messaging me asking how I installed Android 2.2 on my Orange branded HTC Hero, so thought I’d pop this quick guide together for you all.<\/p>\n
Please note: This Guide is for people with an Orange Branded Hero (the Graphite version, with the Orange sticker on the back) but should work for everyone else too (but don’t flash the orange rom!)<\/p>\n
All Credit and thanks go to the wonderful developers at XDA and VillainRom.<\/p>\n
Disclaimer<\/strong><\/p>\n While this process worked perfectly fine for me, and I have done if 4 times now, I take no responsibility if you turn your phone into a paperweight while trying to do this. If your not comfortable with the risks, please ask a friend or wait for HTC and Orange to release *snigger* an official *lol* update instead.<\/p>\n Setting up your Hero<\/strong><\/p>\n To get around the various software locks you need to be running the <\/span>2.73.61.5<\/a> version of the rom. If your using a higher version you wont be able to flash the recovery image.<\/p>\n I had a few problems downgrading my firmware as my Laptop was running Windows 7 so I kept getting Error [170]: USB CONNECTION ERROR and also when it did occasionally reboot into the Bootloader it just timed out trying to re-establish a connection.<\/p>\n After a lot of frustration, I managed to find and resolve the issue, here’s how. If you have an XP machine you can skip this part…<\/p>\n 1) Download the Sync drivers from here<\/a><\/p>\n 2) Open Device Manager on you pc and expand the Android device driver tab. Then run the Rom updater<\/p>\n When the phone reboots into the Bootloader, check the Device Manager to see if a Yellow ! appears over the Bootloader Driver 3) While the phone is still in the bootloader, right-click on the device and choose update driver. (sorry for the vagueness of this step, am at work and cant quite remember, will update the post when I get home)<\/p>\n 4) Click Next to install the driver and we’re done.<\/p>\n If you manage to do this within the Bootloader’s 60 second time-out, the updater will kick in and start flashing the rom. If you have hit the time-out just, restart your phone and re-run the updater.<\/p>\n You should now be successfully downgraded.<\/p>\n Flashing the recovery image<\/strong><\/p>\n I’m not going to write the process for this step as there is a wonderful guide over at www.roothtchero.co.uk<\/a> which is what I followed. Installing Android 2.2<\/strong><\/p>\n I tried a few different 2.1 roms after I had installed recovery and none of them felt right, a couple were sluggish, the stock was ok but didnt have root so I settled for VillainROM12 which is based on the official 2.1 Hero update.<\/p>\n This is however a 2.1 based rom and when last week I saw this announcement on Twitter<\/a>, I thought Yes please so I popped over to the VillainRom forum<\/a> to download and install it. (the current version at time of writing is 1.1.1<\/a>)<\/p>\n To install is easy, download the rom and rename update.zip. Perform a full wipe of both data and dalvik cache (ext is you are using it) and then flash the rom<\/p>\n All that’s left is to download your favourite apps and enjoy the FroYo goodness….<\/p>\n Note: I will update this post with some pictures when I get home tonight…<\/p>\n A few people now have been tweeting and facebook messaging me asking how I installed Android 2.2 on my Orange branded HTC Hero, so thought I’d pop this quick guide together for you all. Please note: This Guide is for people with an Orange Branded Hero (the Graphite version, with the Orange sticker on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[112],"tags":[199,202,193,306,195,200,188,187,201,197,194,196],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":495,"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gavtaylor.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nIf it does you have the same problem I had, otherwise this may not work but is worth a try (you can always uninstall it it doesn’t).<\/p>\n
\nclick on install from disk or known location, and browse to the drivers you downloaded.
\nYou should then see a list of available driver, (I saw 3) one was called Bootloader but don’t pick that as it didn’t work for me, the other two had the same name but different version numbers, I picked the highest version.<\/p>\n
\nIf the site ever comes down I will update this post, but by then I don’t think anyone will be using a HTC Hero. Just follow the guide, step by step until you can successfully load the recovery screen by holding the HOME and POWER buttons to turn your phone on.<\/p>\n
\ncopy the file to the root of your SD card and reboot your phone into recovery.<\/p>\n