Mark's Small Corner Of T'internet

Seems the old method no longer works, HTC have been sneaky or something has changed.  When I try and install a new hosts file on my rooted HTC Legend, AdFree fails with an error, and the phone reboots.  This is some form of protection going on in the rom, even thou it’s rooted.

It CAN be done however.  After a bit of digging, I have worked out how.

Some rough instructions from a HTC Incredible and some tweaks for the Legend and it all works.

1. Search for Adfree Android on the market
2. Install and run
3. allow it to download and install new hosts file, it will copy it to your sdcard and try to replace /system/etc/hosts but fail (it should reboot the phone shortly)Phone may reboot, this is fine, don’t worry. if it doesn’t reboot, check your SD card for a file simply named “hosts”. if it’s there, then continue on.
4. Power off the phone and hold Volume Down and power.
5. Use volume down to select recovery.
6. Download and extract this file to your C:\ drive
7. run recovery-windows.bat
8. In clockwork recovery trackpad down to “partitions menu” and hit the track pad to select
9. Select “mount /system”, “mount /sdcard” and “mount /data”
10. Plug in your usb cord and open a command line on your pc
11. enter adb shell and type: cp /sdcard/hosts /data/data/hosts (This copies the AdFree hosts file from the SD Card to the /data partition, where it can be edited by AdFree)
12. mv /system/etc/hosts /system/etc/hosts.bak (This renames the current hosts file, rather than deleting it, should you ever want to remove AdFree and return to the original hosts file)
13. ln -s /data/data/hosts /system/etc/hosts (This creates a symbolic link, which allows AdFree to edit the hosts file stored in /data while allowing the OS to use the file as if it were stored in /system. You won’t need to reboot into recovery each time you want to update the hosts file!)
14. Reboot and enjoy.

Thanks to jasonb1985 on AndfroidForums for most of the work here.  I just adapted it slightly and documented it and packaged a couple of files up.

NOTE:  If you want to do stuff like remove the totally useless PDFViewer.apk (now that there is a proper Adobe Reader for Android), you can do it after step 13 before rebooting.

example:

• cd/system/apps
• rm PDFViewer.apk
• rm PDFViewer.odex
• rm Quickoffice.apk

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