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Thursday, 11 September 2014

Rooting + CyanogenMod 11 (Android KitKat 4.4.4) on LG G2 L01F DoCoMo

I have an Android LG G2 L01F contracted with DoCoMo in Japan. Can you add any more bloatware DoCoMo?? Geez there is a lot of unnecessary crap that you can't uninstall. And don't get me started on their Phone app, it's like a prepubescent kid who spent 3 hours at Android kiddy school developed it. It's buggy and the UI/UX is horrible as. If I click the call button I expect it to call, not react a minute later!

Anyway, for the reasons above and more I decided to take the brick risk and ROM my phone. And it worked. And it was rather simple. I did a temporary root, then upgraded from the ugly DoCoMo 4.2.2 to KitKat 4.4.4 with the CyanogenMod 11 ROM.


  1. Download the USB serial driver for LG from here. Install it. I did it on Windows 7 64bit.
  2. Make sure your phone is in Developer Mode (Google if not sure: Hint: Press Build Version 7 times) and USB Debugging is enabled.
  3. Download the latest nightly build of CM11 from here.
  4. Download the latest gapps-kk-* from goo.im/gapps if you want Google Play, G-mail ... i.e. all the Google apps (I used this)
  5. Unzip CM11 and change all "l01f" to "L01F" in the following files (I did this because of some silly case-sensitive model-number checking during the CM11 installation):
    META-INF/com/android/metadata
    META-INF/com/google/android/update-script
  6. Re-zip the file with the above modifications.
  7. adb push <CM11 zip file> /sdcard/   (if you don't know what adb is, look up setting up an Android Development environment, or find another way to copy a file to your phone's sdcard)
  8. Also copy gapps to the same place.
  9. Download the rootkit here, unzip it, plug in your phone and run Rootkit.bat. This rootkit seems to use some exploit to gain temporary root access. When prompted, press a key/enter to finish the batch script's installation. Your phone will reboot into CMW. If you reboot your phone normally you'll lose your root access and need to run Rootkit.bat again.
  10. If all went well you'll be booted into something called CMW, ClockworkMod W??? (forgot). You can use this to back up your current system and install a new one. DO A BACKUP NOW!
  11. Then wipe.
  12. Then choose install from zip and choose the CM11 zip file your copied to the sdcard. If all goes well it should install.
  13. Repeat the same for gapps.
  14. Reboot and wah-lah you should have CM11 4.4.4 on your Japanese LG G2 L01F!