Database Users

Install CABs from Extended ROM

Hi all,
I've upgraded to W2K5 on my XDA2. (respect to Buzz and all for their fantastic effort in making this possible) The Extended Rom is now unlocked/un-hidden
I'm confused about 1 thing. I've still got the orignal O2 extended ROM contents but after installing and hard resetting, I dont see the 'Customising' message and none of the CABs get installed.
This isnt a huge problem as I dont want most of them anyway but if I try to install them individually, the one I'm installing gives a message about removing the previously installed Customization Tools.
1. is the only way to install a few of these CABs to cook my own extended ROM?
2. Why would the original O2 extended ROM contents not even attempt to install after upgrading to W2K5/hard reset?
3. Is there a way to install individual CABs from the O2 extended ROM without the previously installed one being removed?
Many thanks in advance for any advice.

you can install whatever you like but
keep in mind that some programs there will not work in BUZZmobile 2005
search the ftp for a 2577 zip files there is the best colection made for BUZZmobile by another god thats really good ;-)

ROM upgrade - how to create your own rom-questions ???

hi i have been looking through this formu but cannot really find what i am after. sorry in advance but if it was covered in other threads please give links.
i would like to upgrade my rom (current i am using pre-installed tmobile mda pro rom) to something batter. the problem is there is so many things in this forum that makes me conufused.
Is it possible (probably it is- but how) to upgrade my ROM by creating my own ROM eg take the best radio rom and extended rom with the stuff i want eg some application i am using right now - instead of normal keyboard get resco keyboard and instead of file explorer get resco explorer and so on and on and put them to the extended rom .
is there any soft to do it ? can someone provide me with links where i can find out something more about ROM cos wiki isnt really helpful and seems to be out of date.
any help wanted !
cheers, cudo
ps. or put tomtom to the extRom...rom that would feauture all the good stuff.

what a pity nobady is willing to help me..maybe u vac just point me to some accurate threads within this forum, if ther are some.
cheers, cudo

To put another Radio ROM in is trivial.
Take out the other two (ExtROM and OS) ROM images and just flash in the Radio file. I did this and didn't even need a hard reset.
To put TomTom into your ExtROM is easy too.
Once you have done your hard reset with your new ROM images and the ExtROM has loaded, you have 10MB of space that you can reclaim. There are instructions at the top of this forum for unlocking the ExtROM and making it appear as another memory area.
Please use backup software regularly so that you don't have to reflash the unit until the next OS upgrade.
Creating a ROM image is more hard work, and I don't know for sure that all the information is accurate. This is only my understanding of the process.
Install the programs that you want in your ROM to your PDA and make a note of the locations of all files and registry entries that are installed.
Take a recent ROM image and unpack it to your desktop.
Delete the programs that you don't want to install, and then search through the hives for the entries that relate to those programs. Delete those too.
Put the files and registry entries of the programs you are putting into your ROM into their post-installed locations.
Rebuild the ROM image.
Flash it in.
Hopefully this won't break your PDA if you get it wrong, I'm guessing that this is very much a trial and error process.
I haven't tried this.
Use this information at your own risk, it could break your PDA.

how do i separate the rom images from each other..i mean radio, os and extended roms ? when i unzip the UNI_TMUK_130114_130232_11003_WWE_BL101_Ship i am getting loads of files but cannot see the right ones.
cheers, cudo

/extended rom/

how do i get to the extended rom directory? i have a t-mobile mda and have total commander (reg editor) installed. I can't find the /extended rom/ directory and also don't really understand what is or what it is there for. i know this might sound like a remedial question to HTC Wizard experts, but if someone could help me I'd greatly appreciate it. Also, if it matters, I'm running xelecin's custom 2.26 ROM.
Thanks.

You won't see it by browsing.. just type in "/extended_rom" and TC will open it. Don't forget the underscore (_) character..
Gee - my first post!

thanks. i entered "/extended_rom" and it brought me to the directory. now that i know how to find it, what is it exactly there for? What is it's purpose. Also, can you access it from activesync? Thanks again for answering these questions.. i'm a beginner with PPCs, but I'm curious about how they work.
Thanks again.

Use the advanced search feature (under the search option tab) to look within the wizard updating forum for the term "extended rom", and you can start to understand how some of the rom developers utilize it (There are 12 pages of entries). These guys are the real 'wizards' - I could not begin to explain the way they do (I'm too new myself).

Your extended ROM contains all of your customizations. If it is a stock ROM it will have all of your carrier customizations. If you have a cooked Ext ROM it could have lots of things. One of the benefits is that if you have to completely clear out the storage it would re-install all the customizations that were in the ext rom.

barrydavisjr said:
...One of the benefits is that if you have to completely clear out the storage it would re-install all the customizations that were in the ext rom.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
so, in simple terms, if you were doing a hard reset (or clear storage in settings), the extended rom directory retains the files, and installs them if they are .cab files.. am I getting warm? Thanks for the info.

you got it. The carriers put it there so that one wouldn't have to call into tech support if you had to do a hard reset.

ok. i get this now. just a couple more questions..
-Do the .CAB files have to be in the main directory (/extended_rom/) or can they be in any subfolder?
-I was reading somewhere that it's a read-only directory.. is there a way to delete files, if so, can you delete the files one at a time or all once?
-finally, can you access the directory from active sync?
Thanks for all the help. I appreciate it.

As far as I know it is unable to be accessed through Active sync. And yes you can delete them off one by one. I would reccomend reading up on it. Faria has produced a wondrful guide on how to cook your extended ROM. When you delete a cab you also have to change the config settings in the notepad file. I have dabbled a little but Faria's guide will help you more.

!!!WARNING!!! if you delete the files from your ext rom and do a hard reset none of the carrier customizations will be installed.. furthermore.. you will not gain any extra space by deleting the cabs, it is a read only partition.. also with that being said, if you try to delete a file from there or add one you take a great risk of corrupting the ext rom and you will be forced to reflash the rom in order to get them back.

just one more question.. I have xelecin's 2.26 custom rom on my MDA. I'm thinking of switching over to either molski's or faria's latest rom. when i flash those roms, the extended rom from the current rom i'm using gets replaced with the custom rom's extended rom, right? does that make sense? Thanks for putting up with my dumb questions and actually answering them! Oh yeah, when i installed the rom i'm using now it did a CID unlock before flashing, so i assume my phone is still unlocked, right?
Thanks again for all the help. i really appreciate it.

thats right. - you'll get the new extended rom.

Extended Rom Contents
I only install a portion of the T-Mobile customization, which I accomplish by preventing the install of the extended rom. I have copied onto my miniSD the files I want to install, and then I just manually run the cabs from there. (Actually, that would erase them, so I copy them first.)
Then you can experiment with other ROMs, still getting the customizations that you need. Here is my thread on this topic:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=272613
I no longer install MP-Shorcut-MMS1-Voice-CV-TMUS-060404.CAB because that just adds MMS to the Messaging app and a shortcut for making voice tags and I don't use MMS.
By the way, it is really useful to install things like Total Commander, Memmaid, weather programs, RSS readers, Zagat, and so on to the miniSD, because then they don't need to be reinstalled after a hard reset. The only thing I have to do is add the shortcuts back, because shortcuts are erased after a hard reset. These programs will no longer auto-update, since nothing can run automatically from the miniSD, but with memmaid you can create automatic updates if you like.
Your backup program should always run from main memory! Also, programs that affect the today screen should also be run from main memory for increased speed. Pretty much everything else can go on the miniSD.

Possible to Upgrade ROM's Without Losing all Settings and Data?

I am currently running the Elegancia 2.5 ROM, but I thought this might be a more general question about ROM's so I wanted to post it here.
I started with the Elegancia 2.0 and upon upgrading to the 2.5, I had to reinstall all my cabs (I save them to a specific folder on my SD card thankfully) and redo all my settings over again. Now that there is a 3.0 version out, I would like to upgrade that as well. However since there are so many settings and cabs that I have now changed and installed, I'd prefer not to go through and do it all again.
Is this possible or is it just the nature of the upgrades that require you to change and redo it all again?
Thanks

its my understanding that flashing erases everything except for the occasional system file left over from the previous ROM... my guess would be no... backup everything and reinstall... at max it'll only take a half hour to reinstall everything..

No way to change ROM's without losing all data...best thing for you to do is use an autoinstall program to resetup your device after a new flash....

mgioia2 said:
No way to change ROM's without losing all data...best thing for you to do is use an autoinstall program to resetup your device after a new flash....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi, could you explain little bit more about the autoinstall program ? how does it work?

try xda_uc, google it. basically, you create a folder called xda_uc on your storage card, and when you first bootup, all the .cabs you add to the folder are installed in the background, and require no input from you. however, you need to find a rom that supports xda_uc. I use energyrom.

Isn't there any program like itunes for example for iPhone which backups and restores every setting. Any thought friends
Thanks

try spb backup...but it wont auto install everything back, but you do get to do some set up if you want as to what to restore.

[Q] Solution to delete cabs/other files that are part of (original) ROM?

Hello,
I am currently using an xda touch diamond that I have been configuring and
maintaining etc. with much devotion over the last ~two years... For that reason, I understandably fear flashing. However, I am running into the hardly-any-space-on-internal-storage-left-problem, and subsequently have been heavily searching for solutions that might enable the deletion of individual rom-files. I think I read twenty times, no, it's not possible. So my question is: Would it be possible to clone the complete device without any data/config loss whatsoever into a file (simililar to what sprite backup does), and in advance of flashing/whatever you will call the complete restore process actually DELETE certain files that used to be undeletable on the device itself.
Thanks for answering this....
Matthias

me1235 said:
Hello,
I am currently using an xda touch diamond that I have been configuring and
maintaining etc. with much devotion over the last ~two years... For that reason, I understandably fear flashing. However, I am running into the hardly-any-space-on-internal-storage-left-problem, and subsequently have been heavily searching for solutions that might enable the deletion of individual rom-files. I think I read twenty times, no, it's not possible. So my question is: Would it be possible to clone the complete device without any data/config loss whatsoever into a file (simililar to what sprite backup does), and in advance of flashing/whatever you will call the complete restore process actually DELETE certain files that used to be undeletable on the device itself.
Thanks for answering this....
Matthias
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You yourself are describing a 'playful' method of building a new ROM!
This is what ROM cooks do when a ROM is made. They remove or edit - files or folders that are inbuilt and add their custom folders to it and 'cook' it. So in a sense the answer is 'YES' you can remove what you don't like in your ROM. But NO you can't do it by your suggested method. You can cook a ROM yourself or ask a cook on forum to do you a favour and delete unwanted files from your ROM and you can flash custom ROM with better space on it - Flashing is not that bad to be honest! I have done it on my WinMo - uncountable times! More than the number of times you might have changed your wallpaper!
So just make sure you read instructions on how to do it. Back up all your data on storage card and contacts too! - there you are ready to go!
After first flash of new ROM you won't take more than 2 hours making your phone as it is! (and you get faster with each flash!)

yes, drupad2drupad is right,
what I would add, I know what you mean, been facing the same decision. Spend year customizing and didn't want to loose it, on the other hand phone become slow and full. Well if there was a simple solution to this, this forum would be 95% smaller. there isn't any universal solution.
you will loose something. some settings, (registry or config files), some customizing. etc.
by using different backup programs or by setting them differently, you can trigger how much to backup, and how much to revert. BUT if you backup everything, (all registry and all files) after flashing you are right where you was. no big change.
what I do is I copy all int.memory to SD card, export all registry, backup only messages (contacts and calendar are in file pim.vol, if you end all programs and disable today plugins, you should be able to copy there and back this too, not loosing nothing by backup converting)
then flashing new rom, restore messages, copy pim.vol back and then slowly, restoring setting for each program I care to do so.
it's either a file in \program files or in \windows or a part of registry. there you open your big exported reg file, search for a name of program and cut,paste to empty reg file and import.
I made a backup script to do this automatically, but it's not possible to make it universal, it will backup only those programs it's set to backup.
back to you question about deleting rom files. you can, after a fashion, but deleting such will only add info to ignore this rom file. which means, rom file stays, but is not visible. thought, you can clean your int memory. removing temp and accumulated useless files, moving programs you use rarely to SD, but this is very time consuming and advance thing to do.

thanks
first of all, thanks to the two of you for such devoted answers! thanks a lot , really.
My guess is it will take me (I'm quite obsessive) 6-10 hours -- research etc. to make sure everything will definitely go fine and finally restore everything to the prior state. Never having messed around with flashing etc., I think it's too much effort to gain some lousy 20 mb.
I still really appreciate your answers. It's a shame there is no universal method to do this is a few steps, with some utility, for everyone...
So I was wondering, what do you think, on a system like the touch diamond, running windows mobile 6.1, with I think ~100 mb internal storage, how many mb should in your opinion at any point in time be free space, to ensure things are running smooth? (And, I suppose/hope flash memory deterioration due to little space left is not that much of an issue...)
Else I'd go as far as "donating" some chrismas bucks to some kindred spirit in guiding me through the process, I just don't have the nerve to do this, for 10 mb... never again will I buy a device that has too small internal storage!
thanks to everyone...
matthias
(edit) ps.: I find it funny that the files in rom can store data (like the 16 MB mxip initdb.vol which is said to carry contacs I believe) - for the novice, like myself, it's kind of difficult to understand why files can be written to, but not decreased in size to free up memory somehow - or do they have a "size limit" / "fixed size"?) but anyway, you need not comment on this.

There is a way that you can reduce your file storage size quite easily....
Thanks to AnDim, see here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=377514.
Do the following steps:
1. Use a back-up tool such as Resco Backup and make a back-up on your storage card.
2. Use Total Commander and copy all of the files in your Windows directory that are NOT part of the ROM. You can do this quite easily by chosing the "Hide files in Rom" part. Then copy and save these files on your desktop.
3. Use AnDim's HTC ROM Image Editor. Open your original rom with this (I hope you have it).
4. Add the files you copied from your desktop to the rom you opened with AnDim's tool.
5. Delete any duplicate files that were in the original rom from the ones you just copied.
6. Save the new rom and flash it.
7. Use Resco Back-up to restore your original rom.
8. Use Total Commander to delete the files created by Resco Back-Up in your Windows folder that you had previously added to the rom.
After all of this, you will find you have much more storage space and a quicker rom because all of the files you added that overwrote a rom file will no longer have duplicate files and also rom files take up less storage space.
Good luck!

hi mitsi,
thanks for that post, highly appreciated! this looks like a solution to the problem I described -- After doing some time-consuming cleanup, I now have some ~10 MB free, so I think I'll wait for this to decrease down to let's say 5MB in the future, and then follow your steps -- which seem to be advanced, but feasible. This is really a great hint. Hope others who run into the same problem will find this thread helpful too. I'm really impressed with quality and helpfulness in this forum, outstanding. Will have to go out and help others where I can now to compensate for my bad conscience
Grüße nach Berlin aus dem Schwarzwald!
M.

I recommend using SPB backup.
I used that program to do what you wanted to do ever since I used Axim x5 (currently TP2).
I have it set up so it automatically make a backup every week on Sunday, so just in case if something goes wrong (bad cab or driver) I can have most of important changes and not LOSE a thing.
So, good luck : )