I have owned an original Droid, which I had rooted and installed a custom ROM on (ChevyNo1) and have written several posts on the rooting process. It seemed like a no-brainer to upgrade to a Droid 2 (better CPU) and jumped at my first chance to do so. It is pretty well known that the Motorola Blur applications on the Droid 2 slow it down to a nearly unusable state, thus more root entertainment.
The rooting process was a little more complicated, but the guys over at XDA had great info on the process. They’ve actually written a script to do the full process in just a couple steps. I went through the process and used the script a few times while I tested out the various ROMs available for the Droid 2.
A friend of mine recently bought a Droid 2 as an upgrade for his Droid (he also ran ChevyNo1). Since I was pretty comfortable with the rooting process he asked me to help him out. After two days of attempting using both the manual process and the script, I was just about ready to chuck his phone out the window. Basically, right after the exploit that allows root access was run, the phone would drop USB connectivity until it was rebooted. So, the process could not be finished.
My first thoughts were that Motorola had released an upgrade that fixed the exploit, but I could not find anyone else that was having the same issue. I decided to try doing an SBF restore on his phone, which failed. For those that don’t know, an SBF restore basically writes the factory OS back to the phone. I have never seen it fail before. During the restore process, I noticed that his bootloader version was different from my phone. In fact it was a lower version, which seemed unusual since I had my phone months before him. Then the lightbulb went off…
I had him check his Verizon account and he actually had a Droid 2 Global (D2G). The Droid 2 Global has numerous discussions around the rooting process and exactly what I was experiencing. This was known.
XDA also has a work around for this via an app called z4root. Z4root will perform the entire rooting process on the phone without a script or having to jump through hoops.
You can get z4root here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=833953
Download the file, then copy it over to your sdcard. To install, you will need to enable untrusted sources for application installation. Then install the package using your favorite file browser. Once it is installed, you can run it and perform the root process. It took about 5 minutes on my friend’s phone.
I then installed Koush’s Droid 2 Boot Manager and Team DeFuse’s Fission ROM Manager. After downloading the D2G version of Fission ROM, I had him up and running.
As a side note, the Fission ROM Manager has broken out some of the Motorola Blur applications so that you can install them separately. Some of them are better than the stock Android version.
Koush had a free version of the Boot Manager on his website. I can’t seem to find it right now (try Google). There is an inexpensive paid version on the Android market. My personal choice was to buy the paid version as it gives him a reason to keep working on it.
Fission ROM can be found at: http://www.teamdefuse.com
It goes without saying (but I will anyway), that rooting your phone (and installing custom ROMs) does pose various risks including voiding your warranty and potentially damaging your phone. The responsibility is all yours if something goes wrong.
