Milestone Madness

I've been trying to update my milestone to run jellybean. So far, that hasn't been going well. I can get it installed, and on my wireless and cellphone networks, but getting those damned Google Apps to install properly is killing me. I don't have enough space to store all the apps, so Ive created an ext3 partition on my SD Card to use as storage, but for whatever reason, they are not installing there. I can manually put them in there, but that kind of defeats the purpose, and then should I need to update, an app, it'll break.

So, now I'm thinking that ICS is the way to go. Here's hoping I have enough room for the most recent GAPPS for that one.

Milestone intro

I bought my Milestone back in 2010, and the first thing I did to it was to root it. this involved flashing a vulnerable boot loader onto the phone, and installing the superuser package. That was basically it. I wasn't all that daunted by it, since I've flashed xbox360 DVD drives, and installed CFW on PSPs the whole process was fairly straightforward.
Download the tools,
Boot the phone into its boot loader,
Flash the vulnerable sbf file
reboot, done.
I didn't have to do anything more if I didn't want to. And well, I didn't, for a while.
But then I wanted to customize. I wanted to change my boot animation, I wanted to remove bloatware, I wanted to overclock. Battery be damned.
So I had to find ROMs designed for my phone, with signed UPDATE.ZIP files. At least until I found the exploit that allows unsigned updates to be installed.
I installed Fire and Ice, MIUI, Cyanogenmod, and anything else I could find. I semibricked my phone a few times, having that SBF file at the ready is a lifesaver. I got stuck without GSM while trying to find a way to install a custom baseband file so I could get back on my carrier. I even got trapped in a Chinese loop. But as a whole its been a great experience, and has shown me how to flash other devices. Like my ASUS Transformer, an old Kindle touch, a KOBO reader, and the HTC Desire. Heck Ive even done an iPod.
But my Milestone was my first, and tought me a lot. Most importantly: Backup, and then when your backups fail, get really good at using Google. Cause odds are, if  youve screwed up, someone else has too, and maybe theyre nice enough to save you some time.

HTC Desire HD

When Rooting and installing a custom bootloader and ROM on the Desire HD, you need to 'S-OFF' the phone, flash a custom recovery image, then, flash a custom ROM using your newly installed recovery image.
There are two methods to S-off your phone;
1) the official way from HTC which involves registering and some jumping through hoops
2) the original way which involves the Advanced Ace Hack Kit
After this you need to flash your recovery image to your phone, Lots of people reccomend using clockworkmod recovery image, but I couldnt get it to do a proper flash (they kept failing partway through). So I prefer "Team Win Recovery Project" TWRP for short.
Once youve used fastboot to flash TWRP onto your phone you should be able to boot into TWRP and make a backup (great idea)
Then the final step;
-Flash your chosen ROM to your phone through your recovery manager.
If you did your S-OFF the official way, you have one more 1/2 step.
You need to extract the boot image from your chosen rom file (zip) on your computer, and use fastboot to flash it onto your phones boot partition.
If you did your S-OFF the original way, you should already be done.
that is the big one.
Ill post a full guide/walkthrough at a future date. but for now, that should be enough

Currently the HTC Desire HD I flashed is running Jellytime, a Cyanogenmod built in July 2012.
Its fairly recent, and has very minor bugs.
Here is a LINK to the main post regarding Jellytime

Welcome

Welcome to the first post in my new blog, meant for cataloguing and storing the hard, soft, system, and other various mods I do in my spare time.
These will mainly involve various Android systems, video game consoles, and other electronics, and even electronic hardware.

My main draw for starting this was to list what things work, and what didn't. I figure if Ive had to go through something, odds are someone else will too.

So heres hoping I can help at least one person out there.