Install system.img on Android Phone

Question

I have made some modification in the android source codes recompile sources and now I have system.img, but I don't know how I can install that image on Android Phone. Have anybody do something similar ? Can anybody provide me some links or information how I can do that ? I am using HTC Amaze Phone.

Answer 1

If you have a fastboot-enabled bootloader then it should be pretty simple. Just put the system.img file somewhere on your PC, connect your device via a USB cable, reboot into your bootloader's fastboot mode and then:

fastboot flash system /path/to/system.img

If you don't have fastboot then you'll have to jump through some more hoops. One option would be to use something like unyaffs to extract the contents of the system.img (if it's an ext2/3/4 filesystem then just mount it) and then package it up as a zip file that can be installed from a custom recovery. There are some tutorials floating around that explain the syntax of the installer script file, but the easiest way to figure it out would probably be to download a custom ROM for your device, unzip it, and look at the updater-script file (should be META-INF/com/google/android/updater-script in the archive).

You may also be able to get away with simply using dd on the device, though I'd be careful if you decide to try it, and make sure you're booted into recovery:

adb push system.img /sdcard/
adb shell
dd if=/sdcard/system.img of=/your/system/partition

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Alternatively, you can often build the source so that it creates a zip file instead of raw images, then install the zip from recovery. I'd suggest checking to see see if you have something like make otapackage available to you.