Un-cyanogenmoding a Motorola Droid

This summer I took a course in Android development at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley (CMUSV), where I finished up a Master’s degree in Software Engineering. CMUSV was gracious enough to lend each student an original Motorola Droid to develop with. Unfortunately, my Droid had been rooted and was running Cyanogenmod, which is great if you are interested in any of the feature-set extensions that it provides. For learning purposes and to avoid any platform inconsistencies, I figured I should be working on “pure” Android. The following steps detail how to restore a Droid to its original glory on Mac OS X:

1. Download the sbf_flash program. This is used to load the new (well, original) firmware.
2. Download the original firmware. I think this particular file is Verizon specific, but I’m not sure to what extent that matters — it could just be Verizon’s file. My phone wasn’t activated so I didn’t deal with the cellular connection.
3. Shutdown the phone
4. Press and hold the up (towards the screen) button on the D-pad and press the power button until the screen lights up.
5. You should see something similar to

Bootloader <version number> Battery OK OK to Program Connect USB Data Cable

1. Plug the phone into your computer
2. The screen should read something like

Transfer Mode: USB

1. Open Terminal and navigate to where you downloaded sbf_flash
2. Run sbf_flash /path/to/original/firmware
3. Wait…
4. Rejoice! Your phone should be back to its old self again.

References:

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