Deleting Hidden Untrusted S60 Themes How-To

Earlier I wrote about a problem with restoring data to my Nokia E71 after a firmware upgrade. Well, there was also another problem. Once again, I started getting the “Untrusted software found on memory card. To install, go to Application manager.” complaint upon my Nokia E71 booting or otherwise mounting the memory card. Application Manager showed no applications marked as “Not installed”, and reinstalling the applications I tend to have installed didn’t fix the problem.

I had reason to suspect that the problem was one or more untrusted, previously installed themes, but the question there was how to find and remove them. S60 provides no function (that I know of) for removing applications and themes that for whatever reason do not show up in Application Manager, and platform security prevents direct access the relevant parts of the filesystem. One has the option of either cracking platfrom security or mounting the memory card as mass storage on another system. I opted for the latter.

The e:/private/10207114/import directory appears to have all the installed themes, while the e:/private/10202dce directory will have any uninstalled ones. The names of the SIS files there are not particularly descriptive, but a tool such as sisinfo can be used to look at the contents of the files, making it easy to determine which ones contain a theme. I used the command

for file in *.sis; do echo $file; sisinfo -f $file -i; done

to list the contents of all the SIS files, and then proceeded to delete all the themes. This got rid of the complaint about untrusted software.

My E71 is now fully recovered from the v300 firmware upgrade, just in time for the release of v400 firmware.