Upgrade Samsung Galaxy SII T-Mobile (SGS-T989) to Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich

by Stephen Fluin 2012.03.29

In the past month or so, three new ICS ROMs have become available for the Samsung Galaxy SII for T-Mobile.  These ROMS have their own issues and problems, and I don't feel like any of them are ready as daily drivers yet.  

None of the ROMs worked "out of the box" for me, and I had to do some digging to get them to work.  Each one entered an infinite boot loop that I had to pull the battery to get out of.  Remember, if you want to boot into recovery, ensure the SGS2 is powered off, then hold volume up, volume down, and power until the Samsung logo appears.  The solution for these boot loops was to do a more thorough wipe than the standard Factory Reset. There is a special tool called DARKSIDE.SUPER.WIPE that will fully erase your system, cache, and data partitions. Make sure you do a full Nandroid backup before doing this, as this will definitely erase parts of your OS.

Here are my notes on each rom.

 

[ROM] [cwm]-ICS-4.0.3-Self-Kang

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1566811

This ROM was the first ROM I tried. After getting it to boot successfully, I attempted to make a phone call and discovered that there were no APNs included with the ROM for T-Mobile. Not wanting to manually install APNs, this ROM was not for me.  I may come back to this one though, as it was the only pure Android ROM, without any TouchWiz, ruining the quality and asthetic of Ice Cream Sandwich.

Download

MD5 Checksum

7b2fe73e6ed1234a8c29d55934747f91

[ROM] Skyrocket ICS Port

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1570012

This was the second ROM I tried. This ROM had no APNs either unfortunately. This meant that for me it was unsuitable as a daily driver.

Download

 

[ROM][cwm]-BLACKEDITION FOR THE SGS2 3-29-2012-ICS

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1531189 

Finally a ROM with APNs, but overall I am definitely not a fan of TouchWiz, and the continuing issues with autorotation and a general lack of polish across all of these ROMs prevented me from adopting it as a daily driver.

Download

 

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