[GUIDE] How to make a Goldcard on Mac/Linux - short version

Hi everyone, I've seen several guides around on how to make a Goldcard, and some were overly complicated, some were just wrong, most of them required pesky windows tools, hex editors etc etc so I'll try to make this one as short and functional as possible.



Goldcards are used to circumvent CID (Customer ID) check when flashing RUUs. So, without it, you can flash only RUUs for your carrier. With it, you can flash any RUU. Not as good as S-OFF, you still cannot flash individual RUU components like radio etc, only whole RUU, but still a step towards freedom.



Prerequisites:



- Your phone, with SD card you plan to make Goldcard of inside, fully booted, ADB debugging enabled, connected to your Linux/Mac box via USB

- Working adb binary for your Linux/Mac (get it from appropriate Android SDK for your OS) or Terminal app on your phone.



1) Get your SD card CID



Enter your phone's shell with adb (or use terminal app on your phone, whatever)



adb shell



Navigate to /sys folder containing your CID (path can be slightly different in your device, but look around a bit and you'll find it, can't be that hard)



cd /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:0001



Get your CID by reading "cid" file



cat cid

1b534d303030303010749634be00c9a4



This is your CID, write it down



2) Transform your CID



First, split your CID in 2-digit groups



1b 53 4d 30 30 30 30 30 10 74 96 34 be 00 c9 a4



Reverse their order



a4 c9 00 be 34 96 74 10 30 30 30 30 30 4d 53 1b



Replace first group with 00



00 c9 00 be 34 96 74 10 30 30 30 30 30 4d 53 1b



Put them together again



00c900be3496741030303030304d531b



That's your transformed CID.



3) Generate goldcard image file



Go to



http://psas.revskills.de/?q=goldcard



Enter your transformed CID, make sure that Goldcard type is set to Android, fill captcha, and click on "Download Goldcard!", you should get goldcard.img file with length of 384 bytes



4) Flash image on your SD card



Put your SD card in card reader on your Mac/Linux box

Make sure it has only 1 partition and format it to Fat32 (won't explain how to do this, this is not Your OS for Dummies)

Don't mount your partition anywhere. Gnome/KDE/Mac OS X will auto-mount, so make sure it's umnounted.



Find out which device in /dev is your SD card using dmesg, mount or something. On Linux it's probably /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc etc. On Mac, /dev/disk1, /dev/disk2 etc. Important thing, look for device that corresponds to your whole SD card, not partition on it (not /dev/sdb1p1 or /dev/disk1s1 for example)



Use "dd" command to flash your goldcard image to your SD card. Triple check that you're targeting the right device in /dev or you will be sorry.



Linux:



dd if=goldcard.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512



Path to device can vary and use sudo if you're not root.



Mac:



sudo dd if=goldcard.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=512


Path to device can vary.



5) Profit



That's it, your SD card is now a Goldcard :cool:



Credits to many people around the Internet who provided various bits of this procedure.

by dulemars via xda-developers http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2073426&goto=newpost http://ifttt.com/images/no_image_card.png http://forum.xda-developers.com/