Monday, September 19, 2011

2. Flashing a Custom Recovery into Nexus S

A typical Android device contains a few partition, the most important being
  1. boot
  2. recovery
  3. system
  4. cache
  5. userdata
The recovery partition can be flashed with a .img file. The basic recovery that comes with stock android has nothing more than the android mascot image with an exclamation symbol!

Replacing this with powerful recoveries like Amun-Ra or Clockwork Mod(CWM) gives you opportunities beyond imagination to play with your device!

The procedure mentioned below uses CWM. You can obtain it for free from the official site. Just get the latest version for 'crespa' the code name of Nexus S.

Flashing custom recovery from within Android requires the phone to be rooted and it's no more different and installing an app from the Android market itself. You could search and download it off Google Android market and follow the simple UI provided.

Although since now, we consider the phone out-of-the-box unrooted, it requires the phone to be in fastboot mode as mentioned in the previous post. (Unlocking the bootloader)

Once in fastboot mode, run the following command on your desktop's terminal.
 
fastboot flash recovery path_to_recovery

That should do the magic. Once done, you can scroll down to the 'recovery mode' in the bootloader menu using the volume button and selecting it with the power button.

Voila! There's you CWM recovery.
 
btw fastboot reboot on your terminal will also remote reboot your phone just like the 
reboot on your bootloader menu.




Just a word of caution: This recovery isn't going to remain here forever. After a complete reboot, this recovery will be lost due to an android-script that runs at boot time, which will replace the stock recovery. A couple of system files will have to be deleted to prevent that. That can be achieved after rooting the device.








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