Dec 1 2011

Nandroid Backups [1201]

Nandroid backups are a fairly simple solution allowing you to avoid loosing all the data on your phone. A nandroid backup is a specific backup type which stores a “full image” of the phone on your memory card allowing you to restore this image at a later date if required.

 

Now you will require a rooted phone and a custom recovery flashed to your boot for this to be able to work – however I somewhat anticipate that you already have this if you are looking at this article.

You will obviously also require that you have a memory card to store your backup image on – a full backup can range completely in size. It really all depends what you have on the phone.

 

If you have all of the above then the process of creation and restoration is reasonably straight forward.

 

Firstly you will want to boot the phone into the recovery menu, and navigate to the backup/restore section in the menu.

If you enter into that section you should be presented with a range of choices, usually somewhat along the lines of:

 

  • Nand Backup
  • Nand + Ext Backup
  • Nand Restore
  • Bart Backup
  • Bart Restore

The option you are looking for is “Nand Backup” (or “Nand Ext Backup” if you have a partitioned SD Card).  Confirm this selection and the task should begin.

The backup should take around 5 minutes to fully complete – but again this completely depends on how many apps and how much data you have on the phone.

Once it is finished you will have a full Nandroid backup on your memory card to be able to restore if needed.

 

Restoring the backup is much the same as the process above with a couple extra points.

 

Firstly you are going to need to boot into the recovery menu, however you will need to do a wipe on the phone/device. So you will need to select the wipe menu, and then “Wipe Data/Factory Reset” and also the “wipe Dalvik-Cache”. Doing this just clears the phone of any software problems that could be replicated onto the backup when you restore it.

 

Next you will need to go into the backup/restore menu and select nand restore. Once selected you will need to select the Device ID which should begin with a “HT”. This ensures that you are restoring the correct backup on the correct device.

 

Select your most recent backup that should be on screen and that’s that. You will probably have to wait at least 5 minutes on newer phones probably longer on older android phones untill the full restore has been done.

 

It will show as completed on screen when done and all you need to do after that is hit reboot and your device/phone should be back in working order the exact same as when you made the backup.

 

One tip I will give you and that is that if you are performing regular backups, clear your legacy backups or move them onto an additional storage device. You will also most probably want to store your most recent backup on another storage device as well incase your phone is stolen or lost. This way you can put it back to the way it was before everything was lost.

 

 

 

 

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Nov 28 2011

Android Unroot (For Warranty) [1128]

 

Ok so even before you begin the major process you will require two things. Firslty an update available for your phone or an old nandroid backup that has a previous version on it and secondly a full nandroid backup after you restore your phone to the original settings.
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Please be advised that this is for reference only, I will not be held responsibility for user errors which cause devices to “brick” or stop working. Android development is still a long way off being perfected so make sure you do your homework before completing any technical tasks.
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One very easy way of unrooting is to install an available system update. However in later versions this is not as easy anymore. Mostly because the update packages are usually signed with official keys and custom builds only accept updates signed with their own custom key. So the way to ideally unroot your phone is to put the stock recovery back onto your device. This stock recovery can usually be found in the stock update.zip, usually under the system folder a file called recovery.img
By flashing the recovery.img into the recovery build, you should then be able to install udpates without having to wipe your applications and settings on your phone. You can enjoy your updated phone without the hassle of having to re-install everything.
There are other additional unroot options for specific android phones however this method should work for the majority of Android devices out on the market at the moment.
The number one reason why you want to unroot your rooted phone is if you are sending it back for repair. Having a rooted phone will majority of void your warrenty.
Overall there is really no step by step process. You will require your original firmware for this method to work!
Firstly you want to loacte the recovery.img file within the update.zip file.
Once located you will want to reboot the phone into the custom recovery mode and connect to your device via ADB.
The next step is to flash the recovery.img onto the device.
adb shell
flash_image recovery /sdcard/recovery.img
Now once you have done that your phone should reboot and boot back up to the homescreen.
Hopefully your phone should be fully unrooted with your warrenty intact 😉
A cheeky way to test this is if you were to try and run anything with superuser permissions you would get “permission denied”.
One last quick tip is to try and remove all the apps that are installed on your phone that require SU permissions. This is a good sign that you have had your phone rooted, and therefore ruining your chance of your phone warrenty being ok.

 

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