Flashing your Android Dev Phone with a Factory System Image
This page provides instructions on how you can flash your Android Dev Phone with a factory Android platform system image and associated radio image. From here, you can also download the actual image binaries, as well as relevant tools to help you flash the images to your device.
With these system image files, you can:- Keep your Dev Phone up to date with the latest Android system images
- Test your application on multiple Android platform versions, to ensure compatibility
- Restore a corrupted device to a factory state
Note that you can flash a system image only to a supported device, as described in the next section.
In this document:For discussions and support about updating your Android Dev Phone, please head over to the Android-DevPhone-Updating group.
Overview
The sections below describe two alternative methods that you use to flash your device with a factory Android system image:- Flashing the device using an updated recovery image (recovery-image method) This approach involves using the adb tool, available in the Android SDK, to copy updated radio and recovery images to the device's recovery partition on the SD card. It's a straightforward operation that you can run in a Windows, OS X, or Linux environment. If you are an Android application developer, this method of flashing your device is recommended. Note that to use this method, the device must have the original factory bootloader that came with the device (hboot 0.95.3000).
- Flashing the device using fastboot commands (fastboot method) This approach is slightly more complicated and involves using the adb tool to update the radio image and the fastboot tool to flash a system image to the device. Flashing your device in this way is useful if you need to install the radio and system images independently or you are already familiar with fastboot and are using it successfully in your environment. To use this method, your device must have a fastboot-compatible bootloader. Having the original factory bootloader included on ADP devices is not required.
Before you get started, decide which of these two methods is appropriate for you, then follow the instructions below, in the order given. The flashing process for both methods is similar ??the main difference is that the recovery-image method does not require the fastboot tool. Rather than using fastboot to flash a system image to the device, you use adb to copy an updated recovery image to the device. All other steps are the same.
Supported Devices
The system images provided on this page are designed only for installation on devices that meet the following requirements:- HTC Dream hardware platform only
- Device must have the original factory bootloader (hboot 0.95.3000) or a development bootloader that supports fastboot
You cannot flash these system images to other hardware platforms or to a version of HTC Dream hardware that doesn't have an original factory bootloader, unless the device bootloader supports fastboot (fastboot is described in the next section). Additionally, you cannot flash these images to a retail devices such as the T-Mobile G1 because the images do not have the appropriate cryptographic signatures.