Thursday, July 25, 2013

Installing a factory image on a Nexus device from a Windows machine

Jelly Bean 4.3


Yesterday, Google release an update to the Android platform, Android 4.3. For those of you who are just like me and cannot wait for the OTA update, here is the process to update your Nexus device to the latest version without losing your data : 

1. Make sure you have all needed drivers, adb and fastboot and your environment variable setted up
- Android 1.0 fastboot drivers : http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4174784/usb_driver.zip
- Android SDK http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html

2. Download the image from Google : https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

3. Unzip the .tgz image to a folder (I use C:\android)

4. Open the file named flash-all.bat with a text editor like Notepad and remove the "-w" parameter from "fastboot -w update 

image-deviceName-buildNumber.zip"

5. Delete "userdata.img" from "image-deviceName-buildNumber.zip". You can also delete the "recovery.img" if you have a custom recovery and don't want to have to flash it again.

6. Reboot your device into the bootloader

7. Run the flash-all.bat command


8. Wait for the device to reboot and you're all done !

Note : This only work for devices with unlocked bootloaders. If you want to unlock your, connect your phone to your computer while in recovery mode (usually Vol Up+Vol Down+Power Button), open a command prompt and type fastboot devices. If you see your device you are good to go. In the command prompt type fastboot oem unlock. Wait for the command to finish and you're done, you can proceed with the update.

Disclaimer : I am not responsible if you break your device. You do this at your own risk !