Alot of people have been asking for this and although there are many tutorials on how to cook your own ROM, this is specific to the i900 kitchen by the guys at PDAclan and mrtoto tools from PDAMobiz, so thanks for all the great tools. I will not be going through stuff like creating your packages and such as there are many tutorials on that. Only things releated to the i900 kitchen will be focused on.

As with real cooking, different people have different ways of doing things, so this is the way I prefer to do it.

Edit: Before starting, please make sure you have the latest framework installed, you can get it here, if not the tools will not function properly and errors will occur.

- First get either a .exe updater or PDA.bin (rename if you must) file and dump it in the root directory. Drag and drop either the .exe to extractrom_exe or PDA.bin to extractrom_bin



- If you used a .exe updater, the eboot, csc and phone .bin files will be extracted out, you need these files for later, when repacking the .exe installer.



- Once extracting is done, there will be OEM/SYS folders and a new XIP folder in ROM.



- You should see these folders in OEM (left) and SYS (right)



- These are the apps found in OEM/OEMApps. Open the .rgu which contains registry settings in Notepad. As an example, if you delete the file secst.dll in the OEMApps folder, then you must delete the entry in the .rgu too.



- Another example... After you delete an app and rgu entries, go to initflashfiles.dat in OEM/OEM_Lang_0409 and search for more references to the files.



- After removing files, you will need to add your own custom apps in the form of packages, if you do a search on them, there will many tutorials on that. I am not going into it as it is pretty standard stuff.



- Once you're happy with removing and adding your customisations, it is time to build your ROM. Go back to the root directory and drag OS.nb to BuildROM. Click the green play button and you're on your way.



- Once that's done, you will have a NewROM.bin file which you must rename to PDA.bin. Remember the csc, eboot and phone files earlier, it must all be in the same directory. (I prefer to create a new directory for this)



- Open your command prompt and start packing your new ROM. Once all files are packed, you will have your new updater which you run to update your device. As usual, make sure you have proper modem drivers installed.



You're Done!

That's pretty much it, the hard part would be during customisation where you have to make sure all references to the app you wish to remove are properly deleted. When there are duplicated files or registry entries, it will throw you an error during building, so watch out for that.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to ask and I will try to answer them when I can.

Cheers!

Attached File(s)

 

Hi PaSSoA !

First, a BIG thanks for your works

I've been looking to a lot of "HowTo"s from XDA and other forum since a week, and I spent a LOT of time every day... And I think its quite interesting, and definitly its not time lost

I've got my i900 for 2 months, my first winmo phone, and I'd like to cook a slim french rom. But first of all, I'd like to just pack a rom AND repack a rom. Quite easy i thought... but not (for me ...) !!! When I drag'n drop OS.nb to BuildROM.cmd, I've got an error :



(it said that the system can't execute the specified program)

OK OK, I know I'm a noob cooker, but I'm here for cooking, and Id love to

please please, help me

What were your exact steps before this?

Hi PaSSoA,

I have one question. I didn't have an updater.exe or PDA.bin, I have only an img.file, what can I do with it ?

Best regards
Reddeer2000

Nevermind. I think the answer I'm looking for lies in initflashfiles.dat

I have the same error as JonPhone. When I looked into BuildROM.cmd, there is a line, "IF not exist Temp\dump\default.hv"
I don't have "Temp\dump\default.hv", therefore, resulted in this error.

help me please!
After i dragged and dropped the .exe file to extractrom_exe there was an error:




and after finished, there's nothing in OEM folder
what happened to me???

For the errors, it has probably something to do with the buildOS stage, especially if there was a problem creating the registry, then default.hv would not be created and building cannot continue, what are the exact steps / modifications done?



Please make sure you have the latest framework installed here

I've got this message just after I created OEM / SYS , etc... In fact just after extraction process ! so I didn't add or del or modify files weird isn't it ?

I tried with differents roms (XHH2 and XHH4). I'll try with DTHJ5 or newer, but I won't be surprised if it'll fail again...

like ebliss, I dont have any "default.hv" file in Temp\Dump (and no directory as well )

which step did we miss ?

Thank you PaSSoA definitly you're the best

replying to mrbeanicb solved my problem ! Yes, we have to install MS Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable to use RebuildROM.cmd, unless you've got my error

@PaSSoA : maybe you'd just edit your 1st post and add this to the necessaries' tools ?

pls help me how to do steps 5-6!i cant even see samsung today items

Thanks JonPhone, edited 1st post

What were your previous steps? Have you downloaded the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package? It is needed for the tools to work properly, please check 1st post for the link

ok thanks passoa...i'll give it a try.

how did you do this?already installed c++

"These are the apps found in OEM/OEMApps. Open the .rgu which contains registry settings in Notepad. As an example, if you delete the file secst.dll in the OEMApps folder, then you must delete the entry in the .rgu too. "

man... i´ve nothing in my oem dir... why? i just drag and drop the new i900_M2D01_PaS08.exe to ExtractROM_exe.cmd and all work well but the oem folder leaves just empty... and yes i installed the latest vc++ thing

Ok... tonight, I really scared myself

after verifying unpack and repack function, I tried to cook my own 1st rom (delete shozu and other "useless" stuff and replace .NET). And maybe I've been too speedy, too greedy and, obviously, too "nooby"

repack the new directories was done with no problem, but apparently I did something wrong because Ive got the "incorrect version software" message. after that, I tried to flash with the original ROM (official French H2, partially branded), and everything fine

so tomorrow, I will try to unpack -> repack -> flash , nothing more

Sorry buddy, can't use my ROM, I removed all rgu files when building it. You have to use an official update

Yesterday i try to add flashlite 3.1 on my cooked rom,but when i flashed it Opera crashes when load site like youtube.
So,in the original rom i cancel flashlite.dll,flashsnddec.dll and si_impl.dll and relative registry keys...i forget nothing?
I use a cab found on xda-developers named my_flash3.1.cab to extract oem package,is the right file or there is another to use?

Regards.

You might want to mention that the BuildOS window need to be closed before the main dos program continues to build the NewROM.bin. Or that's what I experience anyway.

Is it possible to alter BuildRom.cmd's line "ren %~nx1%.NEW.EXA.bin NewROM.bin"
to "ren %~nx1%.NEW.EXA.bin PDA.bin"

And add "i900tool.exe -p test.exe" after "del *.new*" so that the exe is automatically built instead of having to open a dos box?