ANDROID RECOVERY

Stock Android recovery

The stock Android tablet comes with a rudimentary "stock" recovery system. Here's a screenshot mockup of what it looks like (not possible to do a screenshot since ADB isn't available):

This has some serious problems:

• It can only be accessed by rebooting from the running Android system itself, by going through Settings -> Backup & reset -> Recovery mode (Under "system upgrade").
• Unlike other recovery ROMs (e.g. CWM, see later), it cannot be accessed by some combination of pressing buttons during startup. If you do press Vol + and Power together for a while, all you get is the "belly-up" robot, with no menu.
• Whilst in stock recovery, there is no Android Debug Bridge (ADB) available. This is serious, since so much can be done using ADB (e.g. flashing or backing up ROMs).

CWM Recovery v6.0.1.2

There's various custom recovery images - a popular one is Clockworkmod. This can be installed through the app "ROM Manager", but it sometimes has problems if it can't recognize your tablet. As it turned out, when I first used Uberizer to backup my partitions, it automatically installed the CWM recovery image, which works fine. Here's how to install it manually.

The image file is called "recovery.img" and is in the changer_files directory in Uberizer's main program directory. Copy it into Uberizer's main directory, since that's where we'll be running commands from.

We'll be using ADB. First, start up the tablet into full Android. Connect to the computer. Fire up a command prompt, navigate to Uberizer's directory, and start ADB:

adb devices

Use ADB to push the recovery.img file to a location on the tablet. If in full Android, I save it to the internal SD card:

adb push recovery.img /sdcard/

Next we will write the image directly to the recovery partition on the tablet. In my case, this is /dev/block/nandg - yours may be different. Run the following:

adb shell "cat /sdcard/recovery.img > /dev/block/nandg"

After a brief pause, you'll now have the new recovery partition written. Shut down the tablet.

To start up into recovery mode, press and hold the Vol + button, then press and hold the Power button until the screen lights up:

Sometimes, it doesn't boot into recovery. Try ensuring the tablet it disconnected from the USB and power, and try again.