Update your S-OFF HTC EVO 4G LTE to Sense 5 Android 4.3
I’d mentioned before that the new Sense 5 Android 4.3 update of Captain_Throwback’s that’s recently been released is a bit more of a jump through hoops than the usual, so I sat down tonight and got it done and here are the steps that I took which may work for you and alternately may not.
I will stress that you should read the development thread directions in addition to anything I write here. This is my simple method and some issues I ran into.
First off, back up your internal SD contents, this is one of the few installs of a ROM that will destroy it. The camera app sometimes saves to /sdcard/dcim, so make sure you make sure your photos are safe. The external SD card will not be touched.
Make a nandroid and final backup with Titanium. The nandroid will be useless as you can’t go back to old ROMs once you have the new firmware installed, the developers will need to update their ROMs for the new partition layout.
Also, be aware when you come back your Titanium Backup labels will be gone unless you save them somehow. My guess is they’re stored in /SDCard/TitaniumBackup. My data was fine, labels were shot.
Next, download the files listed as:
- PJ75IMG firmware zip w/recovery included
- Sense 4.13.651.1 Sense 5 Android 4.3 – Deodex
- Grab SuperSU flashable from here
Verify using WinRAR, PKZip, whatever your zip testing tool of choice is that all of these files are valid. Don’t skip this step, I got a bad download of the firmware the first time around, that could have been disastrous.
Copy all of these to the root of your external SD card. Just for giggles, test them again once they’re on the external SD card. I had my copy stall out for some reason, so I was extra paranoid.
Rename the PJ75IMG+recovery090214.zip file to PJ75IMG.zip. If you don’t see the zip extension, don’t put it there. If you don’t know what’s going on with seeing the extension or not, it’s your operating system and how it’s set to display known file extensions.
Get into the bootloader (power off phone, power on + vol down) and it should find and updated PJ75IMG and ask you if you want to update it. Choosing yes will forever put you in a new partition state, so only go ahead if you’re ready, no turning back at this point.
The phone will reboot the bootloader once during the update, you’ll see two options 6 & 7 that will say something that it was bypassed, ignore those. After the update is complete the phone will reboot and freeze at the HTC white screen.
At this point, pop the back off the EVO 4G LTE, pop the SD card out, press and hold the power button until the phone shuts off, press and hold the power button plus volume down to get into recovery. Welcome to your new recovery, it looks exactly like your old recovery.
Put the SD card back into the phone and wait for a few seconds. I went into Mounts, selected external SD, and mounted USB storage and deleted the PJ75IMG off of the external SD card so I wouldn’t get stuck having to yank the SD card when I needed recovery.
After that, flash the Sense update zip, flash the SuperSU flashable, reboot the phone.
Walk away for a bit, it’s going to hang at the HTC screen for a good four to six minutes. I’m not exactly sure how long it was, but when I had given up hope I noticed the screen dim, the lights change, and suddenly I was booting.
Initial boot is also very long, subsequent boots are pretty quick.
After it was installed, the only issue I seemed to have was Titanium Backup didn’t want to see the ext_sd but searching the whole device for backups seemed to locate them fine. Titanium also lost all of my labels, so restore time was significantly longer than average.
I haven’t gotten a chance to test the radios out too much, but the Sense 5 seems to run slightly slower than Yankee’s Sense 5 offerings. Then again, this is also a pre-release stock kernel, and I was running Dirty MAC on that version.
Anyway, if you’re still on the fence for Sense 5, it should be out sometime soon, but judging by what I’ve read the official development version still has some bugs.
