HTC 8125 Hacking

in which Our Hero attempts to use SDHC cards with his Cingular 8125, Windows Mobile 5 phone, a.k.a. WIZ100 or HTC Wizard.  A harrowing tale of suspense, long hours in front of a monitor reading the forum at xda-developers.com, eyestrain and terror at the thought that I may have to flash the ROM altogether.

So, first I tried to simply hack the system with a bunch of different SDHC hacks, which in fact killed my SD card reading ability entirely.

Oops.

Well, I don’t really love this phone anyway, except that I had it hacked up pretty much the way I wanted it except for the 2Gb limit to my SD storage (see previous AD2P post, below and KanaFlash and Spanish FlashCard App). So, I figured I might as well look at replacing the ROM with something a little more modern with SDHC support baked in…like Windows Mobile 6.5.  Good idea, right?

Oh, gods.

This is an enterprise fraught with undreamed-of perils.  First, CID-unlocking (the phone from ATT, so I can load whoever’s ROM I want) and all this involves.  I need to do this if I have G4, but not if I have G3.  I could have sworn I had G3 yesterday when I was fooling around with the SDHC stuff, but today I seem to have G4.  Ugh.  I can tell I do because my IPL and SPL (bootloader stuff) is 2.25.0001—the three zeros mean G4.

I could have sworn there were two zeros there yesterday, and I wrote it down in my notebook which I left at work…grrr [I checked; it WAS two zeros then].  Anyway, these details are hugely important, since I could brick this puppy (and have a great excuse to get a nice, new phone) by using the wrong loader, image or both.  I live in fear, since there is no extant FAQ on just how to do this, and these details count.  However, there is a forty-five page forum thread on this topic at xda-developers.com.

I should finish reading it about August, I think.

So, here’s what I know:

Device Model Cingular 8125, CID WIZCNG01, DOC G3 / G4, ROM Date 2006 11 May, IPL/SPL 2.25.0001, ROM Version 2.25.1.11, Radio Version 02.25.11, OS 5.1.195, Build 14928.2.2.0, Protocol version 4.1.13.12, ExtROM version 2.25.11.102

If it’s a G4 phone, then I need to unlock it from CID using the IMEI number under the SIM card, and a for-pay utility here.  Then I could load the ROM I got here [turns out I can use a different IMEI that I also found at xda-developers.com], assuming it is a G4 which uses a different ROM loader than the G3–no small difference, that.  Once again, masonry is a real possibility.

You would think that a clear-cut version of what is now very old technology would be apparent;  no my brothers, not one malenky bit. Ancient technology such as this (ca 2007) is best not messed with.

Exciting update: I hard reset it, and got my (old) functionality back…a mixed blessing.  In the meantime, I found that I can pre-pay ATT $25 a month for 300 minutes, unlimited texting and unlimited slow data, so that’s one thing I’m going to do Real Soon Now.  And pay full price for a nice Android phone, for which I can also write my little programs, albeit in java.

Had to get this all off my chest, as it ate a great deal of my (limited) attention for a while.