cyanogenmod gone awry
Two weeks ago I decided to take the plunge into Apps2SD effectively moving the applications out of memory on my G1 and onto my 8GB SD card. The process is pretty seamless whether you use Amon_RA recovery (my preferred method) or GParted.
For the first few days Android was flying like a champ: applications loaded quicker, I could run all my apps without the almost out of memory warning, and the UI was snappier. Moore’s law struck and on day 6 the microphone on my phone stopped working; for incoming and outgoing calls no one could hear me.
At first the issue was sporadic. A reboot of my phone, re-flashing cyanogen or a NAND and ext restore would fix the issue but it would only last a few hours. Some people could hear me saying while clear I was extremely quiet. Others said they could hear me begin to speak then I would cut out becoming completely silent. I decided it must be a radio issue and tried flashing the latest stable release 2.22.23.02 (G1) which made the problem worse. I flashed back to Radio 2.22.19.26I and opted to try Sound Manger from the Market.
Setting the In-Call volume to the highest setting with Sound Manager had no affect so I tried the free version of Louder Volume Hack 3.6. If only for a short time IC2 (or the loud in-call volume) did the trick. With IC2 however I had quite a bit of reverb and echo which according to the LVH documentation could be resolved by v6r2. To use v6r2 you need to purchase the full app, so I pulled the trigger and pushed v6r2+IC2. Yet again, the issue was fixed if only for one or two calls.
At this point I was pretty much fed up with Cyanogen Mod so I installed the SDK and used ADB to move my applications back into memory. With a little help from GParted I reformatted my SD card, did a complete wipe and flashed CyanogenMod 4.1.999. When calls magically began to work I decided to upgrade to 4.2.15.1 which killed my microphone and forced incoming calls directly to voice mail. While there are settings to forward all calls or specific contacts directly to voice mail none were checked. I tried enabling those options, rebooting my phone, and un-checking but the issue persisted.
Over at the Cyanogen Mod wiki and the xda-developers forum there’s mention of this issue however I was unable to find anything that worked for me. A few users had luck with carrier dialing codes to force calls out of voice mail and one person went as far as removing Cyanogen Mod and flashing the stock 1.6 rom. Unrelated posts mentioned slow dialing, missed calls, or low quality audio as a result of a type 2 or type 4 SD card speed class rating. I verified with NewEgg and via the serial number that my card was type 6.
After a few hours of hacking my fix was to partition my SD card with Amon_RA recovery, convert it from ext2 to ext4 then follow the instructions to flash DangerSPL and CM5 here. The process is not difficult and takes about 20 minutes from flash to reboot. The key here is to be patient as the first time you boot your phone it may take 5 to 15 to load CM5. I rebooted after the install and made a NAND back up then created a backup of my audio files using LVH. The only thing left to do is figure out how to get my dialer back as its completely missing in CM5.
I’m still a bit baffled at how Apps2SD could corrupt the AudioPara.csv file or completely disable the microphone. It could be a bad package, a corrupt SD card or possibly faulty hardware. Given the amount of time I put into this I don’t want to buy a new phone, run the G1′s stock 1.6, or RMA to HTC unless it comes down to it.
