Rooting Spice MI-300

Warning:
The process of Rooting your phone may brick your device and may void the manufacturer warranty, I hereby advise readers to be sure about what they are doing and I am not liable for any damage caused to your phone in this process.


NOTE:

• Before Starting the Rooting process, I assume that you have updated your Spice MI-300 with official Android release 2.1 from Spice, and necessary data backup is done(rooting will erase all your phone data - but not the SDCARD data).
• There are two different flavors of Custom ROMs available at Boston Mania, you can choose the suitable flavor either FiretrapVanilla or FiretrapSuger. Following Rooting procedure uses FiretrapSuger.

Simplest Method to root your Android Spice MI-300:

1. Download the zipped nb0(Custom ROM) file from this link.
2. Unzip the downloaded .rar file(using WinRAR) and rename firetrapSugar.nb0 to firmware.nb0
3. Copy firmware.nb0 to your phones SDCARD under root directory(not anywhere in any folder).
4. Switch OFF the phone.
5. Press and hold volume_up+camera buttons, while holding these two buttons, also press and hold Power button(next to 3.5mm audio jack) for about 15 Seconds.
6. Phone will boot and stay in "Android system recovery mode".
7. Using trackball, scroll down to "Download nb0 from sdcard" and push trackball to start updating firmware.
   
8. Wait for the phone to update firmware this may take 2-3 minutes.
9. After the update, phone will reboot with new splash screen "Android"
   

Now you will have shiny Android flavor "firetrapSuger" with root access and some inbuilt applications.... Go-on and buy/download some nice apps like SetCPU/RootExplorer/QuickSSHD/CacheCleaner/WebSharing/Astro/Skype


SetCPU is a Paid Application using which you can set the speed of your cpu between 122Mhz to 600Mhz(try finding some free app for CPU clock from android market)


TIPS for your Rooted MI-300:

• When Root Applications are invoked, Permission for root access will prompt user to confirm for access, you can check "always allow" for the needed applications to avoid re-confirmation every time.
  
• Turn your camera flash to a Torch using a widget SwitchPro available in firetrapSuger.
• Instead of adb through USB, Install QuickSSHd to gain shell access through wi-fi of your phone.
• Using QuickSSHd, you can copy files and folders to your phone over wi-fi using winScp.

After Rooting, I also advise you to take the backup of all data partitions of Flash memory, follow these steps and keep the backup files somewhere safe:

1. Login to your phone using adb or ssh/putty(for this you need QuickSSHd on your phone)
2. If you login using adb, do 'su' and check your phone for super user confirmation and allow the root access
3. Now you will have root permission to read your mtd partitions, run the following 11 linux commands to take the backup of all NANDFlash partitions(brief summary of Flash partitions of your phone can be viewed using 'cat /proc/mtd' command)
   

• cat /dev/mtd/mtd0 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt0.boot
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd1 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt1.misc
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd2 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt2.splash
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd3 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt3.recovery
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd4 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt4.ftm
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd5 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt5.hidden
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd6 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt6.dgbmask
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd7 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt7.system
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd8 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt8.misc2
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd9 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt9.cache
• cat /dev/mtd/mtd10 > /sdcard/bkup.mdt10.userdata

Though you may not need the backup all partitions, but boot and recovery partitions are important, you can copy all these files from SDCARD and keep them safe somewhere on your PC.

There is one last important note:
In case if you want to go back to the official release to claim the warranty from spice, just update rooted phone with 'Software Update Tool' provided by Spice and your phone will be back to normal as it was.