Motorola Droid X Custom Recovery & ROMs Almost a Go?

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The Motorola Droid X, besides being one of the top Android phone available in the USA right now, also happens to be one of the most annoying phones especially for those people that want to root and install Custom ROMs on the device.

I am talking about that eFuse feature that would brick your iPhone when messing with the bootloader. Rooting was assumed to be out of the question, but since then we already know it’s possible to root your Droid X, but that doesn’t mean some people did it flawlessly.

So if rooting your phone is now possible then installing custom ROM should be the next logical step, right? Well, not so fast, folks!

For now it seems that the Droid X has a first custom recovery image. Birdman, a guy famous for his Android shenanigans, has found a way to push custom recovery images to the Droid X. Here’s how this trick is possible albeit not to everyone yet:

Using a hack discovered by the folks who’ve done all the work on the Milestone, birdman has booted a custom recovery on his handset. The process is labor-intensive and dangerous if you’re not prepared to recover from a bricked device (and technically this bricks the device since you can’t reboot into Android at this moment), but it’s a sucessful proof of concept.

Right now he’s working on getting ADB up so we can further investigate what it will take to get a fully functional recovery working (that will also allow reboot back into Android).

From there the focus will move to a more robust recovery and discovery if/how we can do Nandroids and/or write a new /System image (like Froyo).

Birdman has ADB running in his recovery. None of this is packaged or polished yet and can easily brick your device. A bit more research and the basics should be covered and something packaged. I don’t want to quote any timelines yet and risk anything, but “soon” you should reap the rewards of his DAYS of work (he’s literally eating, sleeping, hacking, I know this for a fact because I’m in communication constantly helping with bits here and there).

Forgot to mention in my last update that we can now switch between Android and Recovery at will so this is becoming more useful by the moment. Someone please tell Koush to get ahold of me :)

BirdRain Toolbox is Born! I’m in the process of packaging up our recovery environment while bird tried to get Froyo running. Sadly we will have to get sleep before we expect to get the recovery environment out. I hope to have an .APK out very shortly (today or tomorrow) which will allow for one click root (from the source this time) and once rooted and busybox is in place (which will also be my build), then you will be presented with the option to install our recovery. This DOES NOT unlock or bypass the bootloader. It works like the Milestone approach, only bird found a method of doing it MUCH sooner (21 binaries I think were skipped) and I packaged it up to work much like a ramdisk so it’s very well contained and as a result, much safer (though still not nearly as safe as a custom recovery flash would be). We made a video to demo the recovery, adb access, and proof that /system is our for the taking but it’s 1080p, must be edited down for YouTube and I MUST get some sleep finally so it will be cut/uploaded as soon as I’m up. More news as it’s available.

These are all the updates available so far, and as you can see, there’s more work to follow.

But that’s not all! It looks like a Clockwork Recovery is also available for the Motorola Droid X, this time around coming from Mr. Koush. That only means custom ROMs are coming to the Motorola Droid X, no matter if Motorola likes it or not.

We’re going to keep you updated, folks, so stick around! But we’re also going to remind you that such custom ROM quests for the Droid X might void your warranty so if you really must go down this path, think twice about what it all means!