mr.mobiles: How to Create a Gold Card

Gold Card - For Android Phones

Step by step guide on how to create a goldcard for Android and other smartphones. A GoldCard is a special SD card which, when inserted into your device, allows you to flash RUU files with a different CID to your own device. For example, if you own a T-Mobile branded device, this will allow you to flash a generic ROM.

Spare microSD card
Windows PC (recommended)
ADB (part of the tools folder of the SDK, available for download here
HxD Hex Editor, available for download here

1. Format the microSD card to FAT32 format – name the card as anything you like although I suggest naming it GoldCard

2. Put the microSD card in your device and boot it.

3. Connect the phone to your PC using the MicroUSB to USB cable

4. Put the phone into HTC Sync Mode and ensure USB debugging is enabled

5. Ensure you have unzipped the SDK, then open a command prompt to the extract location. Change to the 'tools directory.

6. Enter 'adb shell cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:*/cid' and press enter. You should get a very long number which looks like this: 532600bd227d9c0347329407514d5402. If it says 'adb server is out of date', ignore this, as long as you get the long number.

7. Visit this page and paste in your number and reverse it. In our example the result would be 00544d5107943247039c7d22bd002653 – It’s actually reversing pairs of numbers and replacing the first pair with 00 (e.g. last pair is 02 so this becomes 00, next to last pair is 54 so the start of the reversed number is 0054 etc).

8. Visit this page and enter your reversed number and create your goldcard image, which will be e-mailed to you.

9. Save the goldcard.img file that was sent via email to your hard drive

10. Change the USB mode on your device from HTC Sync to Disk Drive (alternatively, turn off device, remove card and place into USB card reader). Make sure the removable drive is now visible in Windows Explorer.

11. Open the HxD hex editor. If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you must run the application as administrator.

12. Go to the 'Extra' menu and select 'Open Disk'. Under physical disk, select Removable Disk (your microSD card), uncheck 'Open as Readonly' and click OK. Note that you should select physical disk NOT the logical disk. This is important! Read any warning that may appear about possibly making your disk unreadable and click ok.

13. Go to the 'Extra' menu again and select 'Open Disk Image'. Open the goldcard image that you received by email.

14. Press OK when prompted for 'Sector Size' (selecting 512 (Hard disks/Floppy disks)) and click OK. You should now have two tabs - one is your removable disk, the other is your goldcard image.

15. Click on the goldcard image tab. Go to the 'Edit' menu, choose 'Select All' then select the 'Edit' menu again and select 'Copy'.

16. Click on the 'Removable Disk' tab. Highlight offset (line) 00000000 to offset (line) 00000170 (including the 00000170 line), then click on the 'Edit' menu and select 'Paste Write'.

17. Click on the 'File' menu and select 'Save', accepting the warning.

18. Click on the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Exit’ to close the program.