The phone is fast, free of bloat, and rooted. Maybe I had the wrong kernel installed? Regardless, I got what I wanted here. While that was technically my goal, I'm still a little confused as to why CyanogenMod didn't install. So now I have root on this phone and a Custom ROM on it. You should not use Titanium Backup's Force Remove because it seems to revert the phone back to stock recovery and brick it. To remount the system partition on older software like Gingerbread Android, the command to run in a root shell is: mount -o remount,rw /system /systemĪnd then you can just start removing the apps you don't want or need (as far as I can tell). After a reboot, it seemed to be fine. I also disabled .setupwizard using pm in a root shell so that I wouldn't get the setup and activation screen anymore. I don't know if this is a good way to do it, but I remounted the system partition as read-write and started deleting APKs from the app directory. However, I couldn't do that through all of the settings app. I also have root, so now I can start uninstalling Verizon and Samsung bloatware at my discretion. Again, the kernel and the rest of it are stock I've bundled this into a Heimdall package here so you can do this easily. It's a compressed tar file, so you can pull out the parts you need, but I suggest just putting the whole package into Heimdall.įinally, I found a recovery kernel image that would work: it's a red version of ClockworkMod that has a the 'voodoo lag' patch. Credit where credit is due, here's the inactive XDA-Developer's post that it originally came from (the link in the forum is dead, but this is the guy to give credit to, I just repackaged it).

I converted the stock ROM to a Heimdall package and I'm hosting it here so it's available for anybody who needs it.

This was not easy to find, but I did finally find it as an ODIN package.

To fix this, I searched the internet high and low for the original firmware. This turned out to be stupid, because I bricked my phone many times over. I think for Samsung phones this is standard practice, but this is the first I'm hearing of it This involves putting the phone into Download mode (take out the battery, hold volume down, and plug the phone in). I could not get my phone into FASTBOOT Mode, so I decided to compile and use Heimdall and flash recovery myself. I'm going to omit a lot of details here because this got very hairy very quickly.

Sch i500 root