Sunday, January 6, 2013

Use Razr M on ATT/T-mobile


Note, this does not unlock nor root the phone, it only flashes the radio to Aussie (so that you can use ATT/T-mobile in US). You need a windows computer and a zip software (such as winrar), and I've only tested following steps on Razr M that's already on Jelly Bean 4.1.1.
  1. Get past the initial Verizon setup screen, which attempts to prevent you from proceeding unless there's a Verizon SIM already in the device. You do this by touching four corners of the screen. I did it with the phone in portrait mode (top left -> top right -> bottom right -> bottom left), and here is an idea how to do it in landscape mode.
  2. Skip through all the setup wizards and enable USB Debugging.
  3. Download and install the Motorola usb driver on windows machine, reboot windows
  4. Download and install RSDLite6.1.4 on the windows machine.
  5. Download VZW_XT907_4.1.1-9.8.1Q-27-2-4_1FF.xml.zip (close to 600M)
  6. Download NON-HLOS.bin from the Aussie Razr M (dropbox link). This file is 102.4K, which is twice the size of the corresponding NON-HLOS.bin file from the above xml.zip file.
  7. Replace the 49K NON-HLOS.bin in your above xml.zip with the 102.4K file, and keep it in the zip format. If you have WinRar, just open the zip file with WinRar, navigate to the folder that contains the original NON-HLOS.bin, drag the new NON-HLOS.bin and choose replace and save.
  8. Open RSDLite6.1.4, choose your updated xml.zip file, and unpack it within RSDLite6.1.4.
  9. Power off Razr M, and boot it in fastboot mode. To do this, hold three keys (power, volume up, volume down) together, until you see a menu; then use volume down to navigate to fastboot, and use volume up (not power) to select. Do this fast, otherwise the phone will boot itself into normal mode.
  10. Now connect the phone with the original usb cable to your windows machine, and RSDLite should detect the phone, click start, then wait about 15 minutes (yes, it's slow, but at least RSDLite will tell you it's working on it). If RSDLite couldn't detect the phone, make sure you installed moto usb driver, and turned on USB debugging. The phone will reboot itself into normal mode, and RSDLite will tell you the status of the flash.
  11. Power off the phone, and insert your micro-sim card (this is the middle size sim card that's used in iPhone4 or Nexus4, not the smaller nano-sim in iPhone5, nor the larger mini-sim in Galaxy Nexus or Nexus S). If you have a regular mini-sim, it's relatively easy to cut it with a micro-sim card cutter like this. You can still use your new micro-sim card as a regular mini-sim card, by just putting it into the remaining piece when you cut the card (warning, keep your original frame from the cut, and do not use so-called sim-card converter frames, which are usually thicker and couldn't be put back in the phone without damaging it).
  12. When you power up the phone, it may still complain about the sim card, and you need to dismiss the message that sim is not recognized, but it should just work now.
I only tested T-mobile, which worked fine with phone call and edge data (3G is not supported now, until T-mobile switches to the rumored 3.5G that uses 1700 mhz). ATT is also supposed to work, but I don't have ATT sim card for testing.

After this step, the phone will be useful for T-mobile/ATT in US. However, the phone still has the same old verizon/motorola crap-wares. If you want to flash the OS, you could consider root it, install safestrap, and try CM10. Note, CM10.1 is still buggy (such as camera not working) at the time of this writing. An alternative way is to install an unlocked bootloader using RSDLite, then simply do fastboot flash modem NON-HLOS.bin

References: 

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