Motorola Droid X and Droid 2 will brick themselves if you mess with their bootloaders

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By Vlad Bobleanta on 14 Jul 10

There was bad news for those wanting to run custom ROMs on Motorola’s Droid X and Droid 2, and now there is worse news.

Motorola did state that they’ve chosen to include locked bootloaders on both.

And while this certainly meant it would be very, very difficult to run custom ROMs on Moto’s newest babies, I’m sure that the hacking community would have eventually come up with some procedure to do just that, however complicated it might have been.

Well, new information has surfaced that basically makes it 100% sure that no one, using whatever method, will be able to mess with their Droid X or Droid 2′s , kernel or ROM.

This is thanks to Motorola including something called eFuse into these , a technology that will constantly check said three software components’ versions against those it has hard-coded in.

If they don’t match (and they wouldn’t if you change them in any way), eFuse will corrupt the bootloader on purpose.

This will basically render your high-end smartphone unusable. And you’ll have to talk to Verizon about getting it back to working state. Which may or may not happen, as it’s still unknown whether this is covered by warranty.

So I guess that all of you wanting to do some serious hacking on Android phones should really take Motorola’s advice and buy a different brand.

While this surely will affect only a tiny fraction of the general public, it’s still a decision that doesn’t make much sense to me, especially as Motorola are the only Android-smartphone-producing company to do such a thing.

Now if you simply don’t care about any of this, remember that the Droid X goes on sale in a matter of hours.


Android Police
http://www.unwiredview.com/2010/07/14/motorola-droid-x-and-droid-2-will-brick-themselves-if-you-mess-with-their-bootloaders/


 
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