Gadgetory

hey guys in our last episode of Android power user we talked about how to flash roms using Raw manager which is by far the easiest way you can get or is it there's another way that you can do it it involves a PC whether that's Linux Windows or Mac and you can do it through fastboot there are a few things you've got to have setup we'll call those prerequisites but the process isn't very difficult and if you spend a lot of time on a desktop computer it may actually be a little bit easier than flashing with ROM manager just how easy is it so we're going to talk about on today's episode of the Android power user so the first thing you're going to need to fastboot flash an image onto your device of course is a device in this case my Nexus 7 you're then going to want to reboot it in fastboot mode and you can see I'm already there because that red text says fastboot mode you're going to need to hook it up to your computer with a micro USB cable or whatever cable connects from your device to your computer you're also going to need the Android SDK which is what you can see right here in front of us I've gone ahead and done this now we want to make sure that we can see the device so how do we do that fastboot space devices by remember has well and you can see we've got a serial number we're good to go the device is being seen by the operating system we can now talk to it now you're probably not going to flash a custom ROM like CyanogenMod this way but you might flash a data image or a system image or whatnot so that's what we're going to do I'm going to go ahead and run a directory here on everything that is dot IMG and I do have a system IMG file so let's go ahead and flash that before you do any of this you'll want to make sure you've backed up anything that you aren't comfortable with you know losing so do that very first of all but I'm ready to just to wipe this so let's go ahead and do it now it should be should be noted right now this isn't really going to wipe it's just going to overwrite so before you do this you may want to wipe everything in fact I'm going to show you something here in just a minute that you'll like but let's finish this we're going to fastboot flash system and we're going to flash the system dot IMG so the first part you're calling fastboot yourtongue fastboot two flash something particularly the system partition and we're going to flash it with this file go ahead and hit enter it sends that over tells you how much it is and puts it over on the device now the the nexus 7 at this point is just showing me the same thing that it's always shown me just that that fastboot screen so there's really no status to be seen on it that's going to take a minute so let me show you what I was going to show you and that is over here this is the the image file or the stock image file that comes for the Nagasaki which is the Nexus 7 that I have I've gone ahead and opened this up a little bit let me navigate back here so I've got this Nagasaki I've gone ahead and unpacked it and I've got this flash all flash all SH flash based on SH and then this compressed file if we come over here and look inside this flash all it's a really big long icky thing but you can see it's going through defining some paths and it's erasing everything before it flash boots anything so just to let you know it's it's not flashing anything but until it erases it so I'm probably you know breaking my device but hey that's all kinds of fun I'd rather do it than have you do it so there we go now it said that it went ahead and transferred over took about one minute 56 seconds and that was ok basically just transferred the file to the device and now it is writing system that's going to take probably another couple minutes and then we can boot up so at this point I can reboot and the easiest way to do that is fastboot space reboot and I'm done now I don't want to do this here because I've just borked my device by only flashing the system I haven't flashed data or in and I really don't want to leave it in this state but that's how you would go through flashing an image file I highly recommend that you use the prepackaged stuff this flash all which will do everything for you as long as you're getting your image from a reputable source in this case I downloaded it directly from Google so we know it's good and by Google I mean you know that Android section not the search engine ok just to keep that in mind so there you go if you can try and do all this through a ROM manager like ROM manager but if you need to get in and do it through fastboot with a couple of things a couple of notes you can go ahead and do that so teaching you how to boot and flash boot and flash all kinds of cool stuff with flash boot for the Android guy weekly and pocket now I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching you