Installing Droidmod on Your Droid [Pre 2.1 (2.0.1.)]

So you have a Motorola Droid (not to be confused with the Droid Eris or Droid Incredible… or the upcoming Droid bad-ass), and you’re wanting to make it do cooler things than just the stock software that came with your phone can offer you. You want to root your device. How do you do that? With Droidmod the process is almost foolproof. First we have to go through the usual caveats:

Note: Rooting your device will most likely void the warranty on it, so its not for the faint of heart. If the “black screen with white writing” (terminal) scares you, and you have no clue about any of the inner workings of your phone, rooting may not be the best choice for you. There are plenty of Android applications out there with a sheer wow factor that you can safely download and use. Rooting, while useful, and important for some other activities (such as installing busybox, overclocking, getting root access in terminal, etc), it is not mandatory. Don’t do it just because “everyone else is doing it.” Droidweb takes no responsibility for any harm that may come to your device. We will, however, try to help you if something goes wrong.

This guide is for if your Droid is running 2.0.1, the original android software the Droid was released with. Some people didn’t update to Android v. 2.1 for one reason or the other. If you’re running 2.1, STOP. My next guide will be for you. Worse yet, if you don’t know what 2.0.1 / 2.1 are, you might want to reconsider rooting.

Step 1: Instal DM Updater on your phone

The guys over at Droidmod have made a nice nifty tool called the DM updater to hold you by the hand through the process of rooting and installing Droidmod. To install this tool, go to the Droidmod website and download it via this link. You can just go to the site using your Droid’s browser to save trouble and time. Install the downloaded .apk using the phone’s default package manager. (Be sure to allow non-market apps to be installed on your phone before doing this).

Step 2: Root your phone

When you first run the DM Updater tool, it will warn you that your phone is not rooted. Well… lets fix that.

Follow the onscreen instructions for what to do once the phone reboots. Quite simply it will tell you to do this:

Reboot into recovery mode by holding x while powering on.
Once in recovery mode hold the Camera and Volume Up buttons to get to the recovery menu.
Once on this menu you can use the volume up and down buttons to choose an item, or you can use the dpad for selections. Choose apply sdcard: update.zip
Once Update.zip has been applied, reboot as normal.

Step 3: Install Droidmod

Now that we’ve got a rooted device, its time to install a mod to get the full milage out of our rooted device. Today we’re going to install (surprise surprise) Droidmod. Once your phone is rebooted, restart DM updater and follow the onscreen prompts.

First its going to download a zip file containing all you need to install the new mod. Then its going to reboot once again into recovery mode to install the mod. During this process you choose what custom software you want to install, whether you want to clean install or keep your current apps, and other tweaks and settings you want to apply. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s the process in pictures: