About a month ago I tweeted about installing Cyanogenmod on my notorious HTC Desire (Bravo) mobile. It does have some issues, however, the added features makes me not noticing the bad things. Still, one issue got major when I started using my phone as in-car camera/computer – GPS did not work and not even icon lighted up on status bar. Here’s how to fix it.

The fact that GPS icon won’t show means something that receiver is disabled not by generic GPS switcher, but in some harder way so that Cyanogenmod is not seeing the hardware. After reading some useless forum threads that offered not working solutions, I came up with one that suggested following steps which makes sense if you’ve been clever enough to make stock ROM backup before flashing Cyanogenmod (luckily, I did). So here are the steps:

  1. Boot into recovery mode holding down button and press power button;
  2. I have Revolutionary installed on my recovery mode as Cyanogenmod suggests, so moving straight to “Backup and restore” option;
  3. Make a backup of current ROM (Cyanogenmod 7.2.0.1-bravo in my case);
  4. Select image that contains stock ROM (in my case – HTC’s Android 2.2.2 with Sense) and confirm you want to recover;
  5. After recovery finished, reboot phone – stock software will load;
  6. From stock Android’s settings enable GPS and restart the phone;
  7. Go back to Revolutionary’s restore option and restore Cyanogenmod from backup;
  8. After restarting phone you will get GPS icon back in your status bar as soon as you start Google Maps or any other GPS-enabled app.

So this solution worker perfect for me. To check if GPS started working I used very nice app called GPS Test (get it on Goole Play).