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Finding official LG firmware

Finding official LG firmware

I came across this the other day when I wanted to return two old, used and abused phones back to pristine stock condition.  Over the years Ive flashed recoveries, ROMs and basebands on these old phones and couldnt even begin to guess what software combination they currently have, nor whether they can even connect to a network anymore, so the nuclear option is what I wanted:  burn it to the ground and return to stock, the way they were when I first got them over 5 years ago.

The phones in question are a pair of LG P509T Optimus One (T Mobile P500 Variant).  They originally shipped in 2010 with Froyo 2.2, and saw OTA updates to 2.2.2 and ultimately Gingerbread 2.3.3.  I scoured the Internet for the kdz files, virtually all links to them had disappeared.  Luckily, I found this blog http://lgp500-optimusone.blogspot.com/ which still had some valid links to firmwares, although none of them are the American T-Mobile variant and probably dont have the right modem img to be able to connect to US GSM networks.  Who knows.
After a  bit more googling, I finally found this link.
http://csmg.lgmobile.com/csmg/b2c/client/auth_model_check2.jsp?esn=IMEI
If you replace IMEI with your phones IMEI, it should find the official firmware that the phone shipped with.  In theory... Ive had mixed results with this.  But you can find your IMEI by dialing

*#06#

on your phone, or simply pulling the back off finding the FCC tag with the model, serial and IMEI.

with any luck, it should bring you to a page with html code and a link to your firmware, something like this

Im trying to hunt down exactly where I found my firmware, but not having any luck.  Despite the fact that I found the firmware on csmg.lgmobile.com using google chrome, the exact link is not in my history, just a bunch of dead ends links.  So for the sake of futurity, Ill share the firmware here.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rmz0a1mley11lny/V10S_00.kdz?dl=0

This is the official T-Mobile V10S firmware for the LG Optimus One P509T.  Its Android 2.2.2 with the original baseband on kernel 2.6.35.  It can be rooted using Gingerbreak, debloated with Titanium Backup and the easiest way to install a custom recovery is to install CWM through ROM Manager, all of which are free, but Gingerbreak is not available on the app store.

From there, you can flash the newer baseband, install custom ROMs, etc.  The last official CM rom was a CM 7.2 nightly from 2013, which I can confirm is rock solid and substantially faster than stock.  If you flash the new baseband, you can try out ROMs as recent as KitKat, albeit substantially limited.

Available link for download