Rooting, Installing Clockwork Recovery and Slimbean on the Samsung Galaxy S i9000

Korean girl not included

My housemates old phone, a 2010 model Samsung Galaxy S i9000 over time became unuseable and would freeze and/or crash. Factory resets didnt help apparently. Not sure if he lost data in this but he's now the owner of an iPhone and i volunteered to try and resurrect the device.

The thing was still on whatever was the last supported OS, in this case Android Gingerbread 2.3.6, with Samsung's awful cartoony TouchWiz UI over the top. I thought, why not get Android Jellybean 4.2.2 on this and breathe some life into it, and perhaps fix lots of problems at the same time.

As an iPhone owner myself i'm not too sharp when it comes to Android but i do have a Nook Color i've Jeallybeanized, so i've got some previous experience. Its quite a daunting thing if you've never done it before so I thought i'd make a note of it. Here's what I did.

1. Completely charged the phone.
2. (You will lose your data during this process so you may want to make a backup). As I was starting from scratch, I didnt pay too much attention to this.
3. Enabled USB DEBUGGING in developers option (Settings / Developers I think)
4. Installed Samsung USB Drivers: I got these from here (these are just the drivers so you dont need to install Samsung Kies).

Ok, after that I thought about the steps directly related to flashing the phone with a custom rom. I needed to root the phone, and secondly needed to install Clockwork Mod Recovery (aka CWM). I could do both of those using Odin, so I:

1. Downloaded Odin V.1.85, installed it and launched it.
2. Downloaded Galaxy S Root & CWM Recovery Package and extracted it (there is a .tar file inside).
3. Turned off the phone and rebooted in Download Mode (pressed Home+volume down and then pressed power while holding the previous 2 buttons). Kept these buttons pressed till I saw an Android Robot on my screen.
4. Next I connected my phone via USB CABLE, and wait till ID:COM box turned yellow in main ODIN interference on my screen.
5. Clicked “PDA” on main ODIN interference  and choose the file with the name “cf-root-xx_oxa_jw4-v4.4-cwm3rfs.tar” file in Galaxy S Root folder I downloaded and extracted in step 2. Waited for ODIN to load this file. Checked the “auto Reboot” and “F.Reset Time” boxes and then clicked ”start”. (Also made sure the “Re-partition” and “Flash Lock” were unchecked otherwise I could have bricked my phone.
6. Waited for the process to complete and the restarted my phone.

Job done! Halfway there! Now go and get a cup of Yorkshire Tea. You deserve it.

After that it was just a choice of which rom to choose. As i'd heard that the Galaxy S had limited memory and could get bogged down, and that Samsung chose not to release Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for it because that and the TouchWiz UI would leave it unusable, I looked for a rom that would be fast and cut down on the bloat. For this I chose Slimbean. (I also had my eyes on CyanAOSP and SuperNexus).

All I needed to do now was get the rom and Google Apps package on an SD Card and install them from the CWM boot menu. So this is what I did:

1. Formatted a microSD card in FAT32
2. Downloaded the latest Slimbean custom rom
3. Downloaded the matching Google Apps package from the same site
4. Put both files (still zipped) into the root of the SD. 

Ready to boot up the phone and install!

1. I booted up the phone into the Recovery Mode (You can enter Recovery Mode by pressing volume up & the home button, and holding both simultaneously while pressing the power button)
2. Performed a full data wipe in ClockworkMod recovery. After that selected “flash zip from SD card” and pressed the Home button to select it. I used the volume up and down to move around.
3. Pressed home button to “choose zip from sdcard”.
4. Selected the Android 4.2.2 ROM zip file that I copied to my SD card with the help of the volume keys. I had to browse to "External SD Card" first. Confirmed the process and the installation procedure started. it didn't take very long!
5. Repeated this step for the Google Apps zip file as well.
6. After all this process I clicked on “++++ Go back” and rebooted the phone by selecting “reboot system now” from the recovery menu.
7. The device booted up!

One thing to note was that when I did it the first time, I forgot to do the full wipe and the install process got stuck with a "Semaphore" logo on the screen and I had to remove the battery and then get it back into the CWM and do the wipe, and then do the install again.

Everything seems to work just fine so far. the most difficult thing was finding good pages on how to perform it. These custom rom makers assume everyone knows how to do it!

Anyway, I'm just passing on these instructions so I hope they help!