CyanoGenMod 10.1 (Android 4.2.2)in Galaxy S SGH-T959V

Preface

I promised my brother I could upgrade his old Galaxy S from 2.3.x  so he's up to speed. The CNM site states the ROM they have there does not apply to the T959V, but sourceforge to the rescue they have a ROM that fits this device, here are the steps I went thru to get it done.

The instructions

 Sourceforge does not have the steps so I went to the wiki cyanogenmod for GalaxyS and tweaked their steps of course this requires a bit of patience and trial and error. In escense we have to load first a recovery image to the firmware and then load the ROM above

 Before Loading the ROM

   - Followed the instructions, I carried those in a Mac, the first issue the heimdall would not run on Lion(10.7.x) so I had to use a Mountain Lion(10.8.x)
   - So now that works then the small image Semaphore_2.7.4.tar would not download from the links in the instructions so googled around and found it somewhere else.
   - Could not get the device to go into download mode tried all of those press Vol Down+Home+Power to no avail so I managed to get it with the command below, of course you do need adb on your Mac, if it is not in your path put the whole path for adb

sudo adb reboot download

   - Next hurdle it would not load the zImage (which comes out extracting it from the Semaphore file)

got a wrong protocol, kernel not a valid option and more lovely error messages, the way to go was put kernel in upper case

sudo heimdall flash --KERNEL zImage --no-reboot

  So the prerequisite is done.

 Loading the ROM

  The final step also had some glitches, putting the device into recovery mode can be done asily with VolUp+ VolDown+Power shows the moded recovery screen, but the sd card card got erased with a couple of folders  with  /sdcard being one of those folders, so turn it off and copy over the ROM(zip file) in the sdcard folder and just to be safe rename it to update.zip, now reloading it in recover mode allows to scroll for the file and it starts to load the ROM, some little warning pops but it continues and eventually the CyanoGenMod logo pops it takes a little while but in the end 4.2 comes up and job done.

Also don't forget to download gapps from CyanoGenMod for the 4.2. so that basic Apps are there when rebooting.


One caveat

  After a failed trial it wouldn't load the small image anymore, the way around was put in recovery mode and do wipe data/factory reset and set the USB debugging ON then another trial could be carried out.