Dual Boot ROM on the Samsung Galaxy S2 — Galaxy Dual

galaxy-s-II

With all the Custom ROMs available for this awesome device, it becomes difficult to try each and every one without having to flash it back to your daily driver later.

Not everyone uses more than one phone, and more than one powerful Android phone at that. Well, I’ve got some fantastic news for you folks. XDA developer Kenia1234 has just released a series of Dual Boot ROMs for the GS2! Yep — you read it right, you can have dual roms booting on your Galaxy S2, now. And it’s amazing to have this feature.

It’s a Dual ROM, which you can flash just like any other ROM through CWM, but that’s where the similarity ends. Each ROM has a Primary & Secondary OS. The ROM is based on a specially tweaked kernel, which determines whether you boot into the Primary or Secondary OS, depending upon how you boot the device.

So, if you do a normal boot by pressing the power button as usual, you get into the Primary OS. And if you use the regular 3 button combo (Vol UP + Home + Power) to boot into Recovery Mode, you power up the Secondary OS. Sweet, aint it?

Now since the recovery button combo has been hijacked to provide the secondary boot, how do we get into CWM if we need to? I had the same question going through my head. And as you’ve already guessed, developer did take care of it, providing an alternate way to boot into recovery mode — using the same 3 button combo but with the charging cable plugged in.

Dual Boot Rom Installation:

It’s easy — just download the .zip file of the Galaxy Dual (and of the four variants mentioned below) and flash it from the ClockWorkMod recovery. You can’t use any two roms of your choice to dual boot, at least right now, but developer has made available four variants of the rom, with either of CM7 or MIUI as primary or secondary rom, other being the Samsung’s own firmware.

The four variants available are (get download links from here) :

  1. Primary Samsung Stock + Secondary MIUI
  2. Primary Samsung Stock + Secondary CM7
  3. Primary MIUI + Secondary Samsung Stock
  4. Primary CM7 + Secondary Samsung Stock

Get the download links from the official development page here, where you can keep track of further development of Galaxy Dual, and share your thoughts and suggestions too.

The Galaxy Dual is still under development, so don’t be surprised if something doesn’t work. But for the most part, it runs just fine. Plus, depending on the response, developer Kenia1234 would add more ROMs to the combo options 🙂

I am already downloading the Stock + CM7 ROM…cant wait to flash it first thing in the morning 🙂 Do try it out, and let us know about your dual boot experience in comments below. If you want to appreciate the developers work, find the donation link here.