Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Unify the memory of Find 7 QHD using LVM(All credits to Dev, Entropy)

NOTE: I am not responsible for any physical damage or bricking your device or loss of *imporatant* data or for wasting your *precious* time. Strictly use the info provided at your very own risk.


As discussed in the previous post, the layered memory layout of oppo is arcane and absurd and of course, silly. There are now, two options to come out of this scenario.
1. Modify the physical partitions
2. Provide an intermediate software layer without changing the physical layout of the partitions scheme

Method 1 is dangerous and has to be used with great caution. You need a computer to convert your phone to unified and then to de-unify it. Method 2 is my choice. It does not play with the physical partition layout. This method has been adopted to the find 7 by Dev, Entropy. Oppo incorporated the same methodology in doling out color os 2.0.4i albeit with their own modifications and have not opened their modifications for public scrutiny. Entropy already fixed few issues in their implementation by releasing a boot image with the necessary changes. But, still, it is not up to his expectations.

Now, to really use his actual work, we have to install a custom rom supporting this methodology. We have two after market roms which have implemented this methodology. One is Omni rom and the other is nameless rom. We will go ahead with nameless rom since it uses sources from a variety of after market roms like Cyanogenmod, omni and others. Nameless has support for LVM via the efforts of dev morkx and evisceration. Let us begin

1. Un-unify(You will lose all data in phone storage, external card is safe, by the way)
2. Download the rom and place it in the external sd card
3. Download the gapps from the nameless thread and put it on the external sd card
4. Download these two files from here and place them in the external sd card
5. Place the color os 1.2.7 on the external sd card
6. step 5 is required since some sensors dont play well with the KK betas from oppo and NFC wont work if 1.2.7 is not flashed.
7. step 5 is required to avoid any blank screens while taking calls and other situations.
8. shutdown the phone
9. Put the phone into fastboot mode and connect to pc
10. fastboot twrp > 2.8.0.1
11. reboot to twrp
12. take a backup of the current rom.
13. shut down the phone
14. put the phone into fastboot mode
15. fastboot the oppo recovery
16. Reboot the phone to oppo recovery
17. Flash color os 1.2.7
18. Reboot to color os 1.2.7
19. shutdown the phone
20. fastboot twrp > 2.8.0.1
21. reboot to twrp
22. Do the usual wipes
23. Flash the nameless rom(The latest versions have LVM and coldbird's unification support rolled into one)
24. Flash gapps
25. Reboot to nameless
26. Reboot to twrp
27. Flash the setup_lvm zip from step 4.
28. Reboot to nameless
29. Go to settings and check the storage option.
30. Your phone is now unified and running the latest and greatest android.

Update: After step 28 go to fastboot mode and flash the 2.x modem from the OP of Namelss rom. This resolves majority of sensor issues. If this is not helping then there is a sensor fix also which can be flashed from the same post.

Update2: If you want to switch partition layout on stock roms be sure that you have stock recovery from 2.0.5 beta or above(Only these versions have support for switching partitions on stock rom)

Update3: Since omni rom development for find 7 has stopped, the only options are lineage and CrDroid roms currently on 8.1. If you want the most updated rom for find 7 you have to convert the partition table on the device to chinese partition. To achieve this follow this post to the T.