Waffles! Getcha' hot waffles!

[Thefoodman52]

Okay, obviously from the title, this thread is going to deal with waffle....ing. I'm currently waffling on rooting. I hear that rooting normally would allow for you to restore the phone to factory defaults, if say something happened to the phone and you had to get a new one via insurance. However, with the newest ROM, I continually hear, and was just told (from what I understood), that once you throw this on your phone, your BF stuck with it (no restore option to drop back to factory default). This would be the ONLY thing stopping me from rooting my phone. I like having a safety net to fall back on.

Could someone explain this in a little bit better detail for a current and long time waffler?

 

[AmericanHero]

See how far the rabbit hole goes. Take the red pill.

Rooting is fun.

 

[mooshell]

There is no spoon, hence the pills. Pick any color you like -- red and blue make purple. I run stock on my shiny Hero but that's just because I haven't been bitten by the root bug yet.

 

[AnthroMatt]

Okay, obviously from the title, this thread is going to deal with waffle....ing. I'm currently waffling on rooting. I hear that rooting normally would allow for you to restore the phone to factory defaults, if say something happened to the phone and you had to get a new one via insurance. However, with the newest ROM, I continually hear, and was just told (from what I understood), that once you throw this on your phone, your BF stuck with it (no restore option to drop back to factory default). This would be the ONLY thing stopping me from rooting my phone. I like having a safety net to fall back on.

Could someone explain this in a little bit better detail for a current and long time waffler?

Like you, I just switched from the Moment to the Hero. I rooted my phone and flashed a 1.5 Custom ROM/Kernel. I won't be going to 2.1 until it's officially released from Sprint though, since unlike the Moment, it seems there is no way to go from 2.1 to 1.5 on the Hero.

You can always get back to stock by flashing the RUU for 1.5. There is a thread on it here.

 

[blampars]

Follow the Root guide in the subforum:
http://androidforums.com/all-things-root-sprint-hero/38911-guide-root-rom-faq-tutorial.html

You'll be able to backup your stock 1.5 with nandroid

go to XDA and download one of the 2.1 roms from either Damage or Flipz:
Hero CDMA - xda-developers

Flash the rom. If you don't like 2.1, then from the recovery screen wipe the phone and then from the nandroid option restore the 1.5 backup you made.

you've gone from a 2.1 rom back to your 1.5 rom. I've done it with fresh 1.1 (a 1.5 rom) and with stock 1.5 from any of the various 2.1 roms out there.

In fact, as long as you wipe before hand, you can go from a 1.5 to a 2.1 or a 2.1 to a 1.5 rom no problems. Just remember to wipe before you do it.

 

[Thefoodman52]

Gracias, my fears have been alleviated.

 

[blampars]

i would highly recommend, being a normal user, to not run that 2.1 sprint RUU that's floating around. For one, thats still in development from sprint and not complete. And for two, the 2.1 roms that are being built by the good devs at XDA are much more complete and feature rich. those roms are what you're looking for, not that 2.1 RUU.

once rooted and you've done a nandroid backup of your stock 1.5 phone, you put the rom_of_your_choice.zip on the root of your sdcard

wipe your phone through the recovery menu
select flash zip from sdcard
select your zip
press home to continue

and away you go

read/research first before you do it of course. but that's the general process, in a nutshell.