Gadgetory

hey guys Joe with pocketnow.com have you ever wondered what the recovery image is what it does why do we have it that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of the Android power user so the recovery image just what is that well first we need to talk about Android and the way that it's set up no I'm not talking about icons and widgets and all that kind of stuff I'm talking about the way you well to put it in PC lingo the way the hard drive is partitioned does that make sense okay so what we've got is we have essentially a system image now that system images is where the operating system lives it's where you know your apps go that's over in the data side and whatnot but there's another part and that's the recovery image and you don't use it all that often fact really the only time you use it is when you're applying an update so let's say you've got a perfectly stock Android and you get an over-the-air update it's got to install somehow now it's going to download essentially an update dot zip file and inside that is a manifest and a whole bunch of other stuff instructions and files essentially that says here's what you need to do to apply this update now it might be named something different but for the sake of clarity we'll just call it the update dot zip all right good deal and it is it's just a zip file you can open this thing up on your desktop computer and look at all the stuff that's in it you can't do much with it on your desktop computer except flash it on your Android but hey you know it's always fun to look inside zip files anyhoo so once that file is downloaded on to your machine it triggers something and that something is a reboot into recovery now most people call it recovery mode or just simply recovery or who knows what else people call it but it's your recovery image and it varies by device when your stock OEM they look pretty much the same in fact all you're really gonna see when you're applying an over-the-air update is a download and a prompt to say hey do you want to apply this you say yes it'll say okay I'm rebooting make sure you don't unplug it make sure you have a full battery yada yada yada and it goes ahead and it applies that update after it reboots so reboots into this super special recovery mode and you basically see a status indicator that says hey I'm applying the update please wait and you might even have a status bar and then it's done and it reboots into your system image and that's it okay but that that's not really cool that doesn't make you an Android power user what makes you an Android power user is knowing just like being able to swap out your system image or say a custom ROM a okp CyanogenMod whatever you can swap out your recovery image in fact if you want to do a custom ROM you pretty much have to replace your recovery image so how do you install a new custom recovery image on your device I can't go into details and specifics on every single device suffice it to say you're gonna need a desktop computer you're gonna need a DB and fastboot and you're going to need the recovery image that you're going to apply and of course every recovery image is specific to every device out there so you can't use one recovery image on another device you've got to get the one specific to yours after that it's essentially just flashing that recovery image which is in a dot IMG file over onto your Android which will overwrite the existing recovery image so if you wanted to go back to stock too late after that unless you go back in restore the factory recovery image which you can do just as simple as flashing a custom recovery image okay once that's installed it's pretty easy to reboot into your recovery image now the way you do that again varies by device usually you're holding the the up volume down volume and the power button and it just does it or maybe just the down volume and the power button again it varies by device it's quick search you're gonna find out how to do that once you've got it you can do whatever that recovery image lets you do so for the remainder of this video I'm gonna talk clockworkmod recovery CWM for short or just clockworkmod what that recovery image lets you do of course you can boot up into it and you can flash stuff you can apply other images system images you can fly updates you can install new kernels we'll talk about those in an upcoming video you can do backups you can do restores you can fix permissions you can do a whole bunch of maintenance inside that recovery image and I like it quite a bit now you don't manually have to go in there if you've got some other tool we've talked about a couple of those over at pocketnow.com that let you specify what you want to do in the GUI on the Android side of things the system image side like I've got ROM manager and I want to install an update to CyanogenMod nightly I can do that through the GUI and the GUI essentially sends a parameter string down to the recovery image as it reboots and it does it all automatically for me so although I technically see the recovery image I'm not pushing any buttons I'm not navigating around I'm not telling it to do anything there because I did it all in the GUI and it just handed everything off makes it very simple but that's all in the recovery image that's what that's doing for you I highly recommend clockworkmod recovery if only for the fact that you can do full system backups with that very nice very convenient I liked it quite a bit and it saved my bacon more than once so hat tip off to you clockworkmod recovery that's just a quick overview of what the recovery image is why we have it what it does and a little bit of how it does it if you'd like more information of course head on over to the article at pocketnow.com if you liked this video and thought it was informative make sure you give it a big thumbs up and of course if you want to participate in the conversation have any questions or discussion head over to the article at pocketnow.com if you're watching this video in youtube we'll have the link right down there so just click on that it'll take you right over to the article leave your questions and comments they're talking about all kinds of cool stuff like the Rico image for puckett now and the Android power user I'm Joe Levi