What is a Gold Card ?
A Gold card 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. Forexample if you have a AT&T branded device it will allow you to flash a generic ROM.
What You Need ?
Micro SD Card
ADB (Part of the tools folder of the SDK which can be downloaded from here).
HxD Hex Editor, available for download from here.
Step by Step Create a Gold Card to Flash RUU Files of Android
Before You Begin
Some memory cards just don’t simply allow you edit them the way you want. So you will need to follow this procedure if your micro SD card doesn’t work.
You will need an SD adapter, it can be any SD adapter, micro SD to USB that allows you to plug into your computer’s USB port or micro SD to SD adapter if you have SD port in your computer.
How to Setup ADB
You can follow these step by step instructions in the video to correctly setup ADB for your phone before you continue with the instructions given below on how to convert your SD card into a Gold Card.
How to Setup ADB for Android devices
How to Create Gold Card for Android Devices
Step 1
Put the memory card into your phone, click on ‘Settings’, SD and phone Storage then click unmount memory card. Once it unmounts, Format the micro SD card to FAT32 format. (It will erase all your data so make sure you back up all the important data before you do this step).
Step 2
On the phone, go to ‘Settings’, ‘Applications’ then ‘Development’ and make sure USB debugging is ‘Checked’.
Step 3
Make sure you have installed the SDK and Fast Boot correctly.
Plug the phone into the computer and then open the command prompt then type the following lines of code and enter at the end of each line.
cd\
cd\AndroidSDK\tools\
adb devices
(Wait for it show a serial number underneath if it doesn’t, reinstall the drivers).
Now type:
adb shell
cat /sys/class/mmc_host/mmc1/mmc1:*/cid
Step 4
You should get a long number which may look like this: “532600bd227d9c0347329407514d5402”.
Step 5
Visit this page, enter your number and reverse it. In our example the result would be “00544d5107943247039c7d22bd002653”.
Step 6
Visit this page, enter your reversed number to create your Gold Card image which will be emailed to you.
Step 7
Open the HxD Hex editor , if you are on Windows Vista or Windows 7, run the application as administrator.
Step 8
Go to ‘Extra’ menu and select ‘Open Disk’. Now under physical disk, select removable disk which is your micro SD card, Uncheck ‘Open as Readonly’ and click OK.
Note: You should select the physical disk not the logical disk.
Step 9
Open ‘ Extra’ menu again and select ‘Open Disk Image’ and open the Gold Card Image that you received by email.
Step 10
You should now have two tabs, one is your removable disk and other is your Gold Card Image. Press OK when prompted for “Sector Size” (selecting 512 (Hard disks/Floppy disks)) and click OK.
Step 11
Click on the Gold Card Image tab and go to ‘Edit’ menu, choose ‘Select All” then select the ‘Edit’ menu again and select ‘Copy’.
Step 12
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’.
Step 13
Click on the ‘File’ menu and select ‘Save’, accepting the warning.
You have successfully converted your micro SD card into a Gold Card.
Courtesy @ Paul OBrien, Android Modaco
