Droid Hype

How to make Adfree work on the Droid Incredible

Droid Incredible users who want to use Adfree may have a tough time due to the app not being able to write to the correct hosts file. There are two ways around it and both steps require you to be root. From the thread over at the Incredible Forums:

1. Search for Adfree Android on the market
2. Install and run
3. allow it to download and install new hosts file, it will copy it to your sdcard and try to replace /system/etc/hosts but fail (it should reboot the phone shortly)
4. Phone may reboot, this is fine, don’t worry. if it doesn’t reboot, check your SD card for a file simply named “hosts”. if it’s there, then continue on.
5. Power off the phone and hold Volume Down and power.
6. Use volume down to select recovery
7. In clockwork recovery volume down to “partitions menu” and hit the track pad to select
8. Select “mount /system”, “mount /sdcard” and “mount /data”
9. Plug in your usb cord and open a command line on your pc
10. enter adb shell and type: cp /sdcard/hosts /data/data/hosts (This copies the AdFree hosts file from the SD Card to the /data partition, where it can be edited by AdFree)
11. mv /system/etc/hosts /system/etc/hosts.bak (This renames the current hosts file, rather than deleting it, should you ever want to remove AdFree and return to the original hosts file)
12. ln -s /data/data/hosts /system/etc/hosts (This creates a symbolic link, which allows AdFree to edit the hosts file stored in /data while allowing the OS to use the file as if it were stored in /system. You won’t need to reboot into recovery each time you want to update the hosts file!)

If this is a bit too much to handle, there’s an easier way. Head over to the Unrevoked page and install Unrevoked Forever. This will set your phone’s security level to S-OFF, which will allow Adfree to work. Enjoy!