Working with backups. - HTC Droid DNA

Ok, this may be answered elsewhere, I don't know. "Search is temporarily unavailable" I am trying to understand how I am supposed to work with the backup from CWM. I understand that I should have a System image that I can work in, but what I have is 3 files in its place. System.ext4.tar, System.ext4.tar.a, and System.ext4.tar.b. All three files are broken to some degree.
System.ext4.tar is a zero byte file.
System.ext4.tar.a appears to be a spanned tar file that 7ZIP/WinRAR simply think was cut-off (never asks for the second file, and complains of unexpected End of Archive)
System.ext.4.tar.b appears to be the second part of the archive, but nothing will open it.
So, how do I get to a point I have a complete archive that I can edit? Or do I need to use different software than CWM to back up the phone?
Thanks for the help guys.

waldojim said:
Ok, this may be answered elsewhere, I don't know. "Search is temporarily unavailable" I am trying to understand how I am supposed to work with the backup from CWM. I understand that I should have a System image that I can work in, but what I have is 3 files in its place. System.ext4.tar, System.ext4.tar.a, and System.ext4.tar.b. All three files are broken to some degree.
System.ext4.tar is a zero byte file.
System.ext4.tar.a appears to be a spanned tar file that 7ZIP/WinRAR simply think was cut-off (never asks for the second file, and complains of unexpected End of Archive)
System.ext.4.tar.b appears to be the second part of the archive, but nothing will open it.
So, how do I get to a point I have a complete archive that I can edit? Or do I need to use different software than CWM to back up the phone?
Thanks for the help guys.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, I found a solution for now. Fire up Linux, use cat to combine all three files, then use tar to extract the contents. Not sure why this needed split in the first place, but at least the files can be extracted.

I have managed to remove the APKs I do not want, and made a new system.ext4.tar file (all in Linux), but need to know what else I have to do to make the system image usable.
I found several guides on making a ZIP file, but I didn't want to necessarily go through all that. I backed up everything, so what I would like to know, is what all needs to change so that I can use the separate files as they are, and simply do a CWM "restore" function?
I know I sound like a complete noob at this point, and will deal with the related comments. However, please understand, I don't want the heavily modified rom packs. I simply wanted a rom VOID of all the Verizon bloatware, and have the Verizon tethering restraints removed. I have them all disabled now, and 3rd party tethering is working quite well. So I would rather not have that garbage wasting space. Right now, it looks like I may save 250MB or so.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

waldojim said:
I have managed to remove the APKs I do not want, and made a new system.ext4.tar file (all in Linux), but need to know what else I have to do to make the system image usable.
I found several guides on making a ZIP file, but I didn't want to necessarily go through all that. I backed up everything, so what I would like to know, is what all needs to change so that I can use the separate files as they are, and simply do a CWM "restore" function?
I know I sound like a complete noob at this point, and will deal with the related comments. However, please understand, I don't want the heavily modified rom packs. I simply wanted a rom VOID of all the Verizon bloatware, and have the Verizon tethering restraints removed. I have them all disabled now, and 3rd party tethering is working quite well. So I would rather not have that garbage wasting space. Right now, it looks like I may save 250MB or so.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Backups really aren't meant to be unzipped and played with. Usually bloat removal is done while booted into the system or you can unpackage a Rom and remove the bloat there and then repackage it and flash it then make your backup that doesn't contain any bloat. Using the xda kitchen tools from dsxda I believe is the name
Sent from my HTC6435LVW using XDA Premium HD app

.torrented said:
Backups really aren't meant to be unzipped and played with. Usually bloat removal is done while booted into the system or you can unpackage a Rom and remove the bloat there and then repackage it and flash it then make your backup that doesn't contain any bloat. Using the xda kitchen tools from dsxda I believe is the name
Sent from my HTC6435LVW using XDA Premium HD app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think this is where some of my confusion comes from - it was never zipped. There was a group of tarred files, an MD5sum and a few other items. But nothing there was zipped.

waldojim said:
I think this is where some of my confusion comes from - it was never zipped. There was a group of tarred files, an MD5sum and a few other items. But nothing there was zipped.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I guess what I meant to say by "zipped" was just in general they are compressed by the recovery in a way that it knows how to go and use them to restore data to the device.

Related

[Q] dump modem.bin?

I pretty much give up on this, and it's not all that important, but it's bugging me.
How do you, or even CAN you, dump the radio/modem from this device? The best I've been able to do is scour the web and end up with a 512KB .bin file that essentially contains nothing but 0xFF bytes in it.
(If context is required, I'm learning how to make an ODIN image from a device ... and so far this is the only partition that's really killing me)
Just download one of the complete Odin tar files and use something like winrar to extract all the bin files from it.
Sent from my SCH-I500 using XDA Premium App
you cant dump the modem...its like the only thing that cant be....if making a full odin package, pack in one of our existing ones
nitsuj17 said:
you cant dump the modem...its like the only thing that cant be....if making a full odin package, pack in one of our existing ones
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's what I figured, since it seems to be something you can't do with the Epic either. Do we know if it's because of CDMA? Something that needs to be secured from dumping perhaps? Meh, doesn't matter
Thanks guys!

A few questions to build ROM

I am in the process of building my own rom, but have a few questions for some devs that have built theirs.
1. When I use dsixdas kitchen, when it unpacks system.img with ext2explore, the program crashes after it finishes. I do not know if it is fully unpacking the img file as it is 800+mb and the system dir is only 600+mb (dont know exact numbers off top of my head). Does anyone else have this issue? Can I get a directory listing of all files from someone the program did not crash on?
2. Can the weather*.mp4 files be removed from system media? What about the image files in customize/resource? wtf is the sound in the mms folder of system/media? What about removing languages from tts?
Sorry for asking so many questions, just figured they needed to be asked. I will try figuring this all out for myself, but am going to backup my wimax keys first, dont want to lose those, though I guess TEP would fix it for me. Anyways, thanks for any help

[REQ] Stock AT&T System Dump

Does anyone know where I can find a copy of this? I've done a search and all I can find is one from the international version and that's based on the 2.3.1 build.
TIA
check here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1286432
daraj said:
check here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1286432
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nothing there about stock system dump.
BigBolo said:
Does anyone know where I can find a copy of this? I've done a search and all I can find is one from the international version and that's based on the 2.3.1 build.
TIA
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Entropy512 started with a stock system dump that someone, (maybe Jivy26), made after installing a custom kernel. But I don't remember he ever posted a link to it. He may still have it hanging around, though. That's what he used to make his stock plus root package.
BigBolo said:
Nothing there about stock system dump.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Um, what do you think a flashable stock system image is? (Other than being a sparse ext4 image, if you want something loop-mountable use simg2img...)
Seriously - spend just a LITTLE more time reading before you post in a Development thread. This device has been out for only 2 weeks so it's not like the Dev forum has tons of threads.
There's also a dd-derived system dump in page 5 of codeworkx's CWM kernel thread. I used jivy26's tar dump, although I should probably do a consistency check against seattleboi1982's dump.
Entropy512 said:
Um, what do you think a flashable stock system image is? (Other than being a sparse ext4 image, if you want something loop-mountable use simg2img...)
Seriously - spend just a LITTLE more time reading before you post in a Development thread. This device has been out for only 2 weeks so it's not like the Dev forum has tons of threads.
There's also a dd-derived system dump in page 5 of codeworkx's CWM kernel thread. I used jivy26's tar dump, although I should probably do a consistency check against seattleboi1982's dump.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm actually looking for the system dump in a zip where I can extract it into folders. Not as a image. I want to basically get the media files. I did do a search in several forums trying to find it but came up with nothing.
Maybe I should of been more detailed and specific in my OP.
BigBolo said:
I'm actually looking for the system dump in a zip where I can extract it into folders. Not as a image. I want to basically get the media files. I did do a search in several forums trying to find it but came up with nothing.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can't you just extract the stock system image?
eep2378 said:
Can't you just extract the stock system image?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know how to do that...
Then you probably don't belong in android development (yet).
Use 7zip to extract the zip/tar/whatever.
In general, you're not supposed to put requests in Development. This should have been posted in General.
And a stock system dump IS an image dump. Zip files don't preserve permissions, and tar files only do if you prepared them carefully (good thing jivy26 did). The only way to be sure is to dd the partition.
If you want a nice easy to use zip, use paylyhoffman's stock deodexed CWM zip.
Entropy512 said:
In general, you're not supposed to put requests in Development. This should have been posted in General.
And a stock system dump IS an image dump. Zip files don't preserve permissions, and tar files only do if you prepared them carefully (good thing jivy26 did). The only way to be sure is to dd the partition.
If you want a nice easy to use zip, use paylyhoffman's stock deodexed CWM zip.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for clearing it up. My bad I thought this was the section to post requests like that.
Also folks before jumping on the guy, what he is asking for (at least with the .7z file posted) isn't as straightforward as everyone thinks.
If you first extract the 7z file, you'll get a PDA.tar file. Extract that and you'll get the kernel (zImage) and the lovely factoryfs.img.
Try extracting factoryfs.img with your favorite tools and see what happens.
Extracting the factoryfs.img is a real pain unless you are pretty hardcore -- in fact, there was another thread going on the in international SGS II forum with some pretty well known devs (who know their stuff) trying to figure out how to extract that bad boy.
So before everyone starts throwing rocks...you know the story.
Does this look easy to you?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1054836 (relevant discussion starts around post #7)
and another solution (which also is not as simple as "right-click and extract")
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1081239
Now -- with that said, if one was really looking for an easy way to pull some media files from a ROM, you best bet would be to try and find a CWM flashable ROM (in a zip format) and do a regular extract on those, and you may find it much easier. They may not be stock, but if it's close, you may get lucky and find some of the stock media in them.
pinoymutt said:
Also folks before jumping on the guy, what he is asking for (at least with the .7z file posted) isn't as straightforward as everyone thinks.
If you first extract the 7z file, you'll get a PDA.tar file. Extract that and you'll get the kernel (zImage) and the lovely factoryfs.img.
Try extracting factoryfs.img with your favorite tools and see what happens.
Extracting the factoryfs.img is a real pain unless you are pretty hardcore -- in fact, there was another thread going on the in international SGS II forum with some pretty well known devs (who know their stuff) trying to figure out how to extract that bad boy.
So before everyone starts throwing rocks...you know the story.
Does this look easy to you?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1054836 (relevant discussion starts around post #7)
and another solution (which also is not as simple as "right-click and extract")
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1081239
Now -- with that said, if one was really looking for an easy way to pull some media files from a ROM, you best bet would be to try and find a CWM flashable ROM (in a zip format) and do a regular extract on those, and you may find it much easier. They may not be stock, but if it's close, you may get lucky and find some of the stock media in them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for clarifying that pinoymutt. Yea basically I know a lot of people don't like the finished charging notification but I don't mind it and I figured it's as simple as just placing the ogg file back in the ui folder. I'm on DG's Cog X2 and he had removed that.
BigBolo said:
Thanks for clarifying that pinoymutt. Yea basically I know a lot of people don't like the finished charging notification but I don't mind it and I figured it's as simple as just placing the ogg file back in the ui folder. I'm on DG's Cog X2 and he had removed that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Doubt it's that simple. I removed the notification by modifying code. I would bet dg did the same.

[Q] APK Creation

Well as many of you know we're over most of the hurdles we needed to jump with the CM7 build for Nook tablet.
Updates for the internal version are simple via CWM, the SD version is not so simple of course.
I'm assuming that it should be possible to built an APK that gains superuser permissions then copies the new files to the system. Can anybody confirm this is possible please?
We need to know that we can tell our SD user that they can update their version just as easy as the internal user
Thanks in advance for your help again everyone!
Well presumably this is how ROM Manager and Metamorph both do their thing, just in a slightly more round about way (as they don't come with the files they need to copy). I'm almost 100% sure this is possible, but I've never tried it personally.
EDIT: Looks like this is how you'd do it: http://developer.android.com/reference/java/io/File.html. Specifically the renameTo() method.
CelticWebSolutions said:
Well as many of you know we're over most of the hurdles we needed to jump with the CM7 build for Nook tablet.
Updates for the internal version are simple via CWM, the SD version is not so simple of course.
I'm assuming that it should be possible to built an APK that gains superuser permissions then copies the new files to the system. Can anybody confirm this is possible please?
We need to know that we can tell our SD user that they can update their version just as easy as the internal user
Thanks in advance for your help again everyone!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well there are about a dozen ways to do this. First of one of the hardest things is comming up with the commands/script. I can defiantly do this. If you want an apk, there are a few guys whom could port my script to an apk. I'm going to make a script here that will format, and create partitions and extract directly from the nook, no need to go through the fancy formatting and such, just go into terminal and run the script. Ill post a prototype for you to have the testers test!
Do you think something like BacksideUpdater inside custom ROM for LG Optimus V?
made by JerryScript
JerryScript i very nice guy, I bet if you ask him, he will let you play with his code
if is it what you looking for
Yes, this is possible. I wrote an app that flashes the recovery partition for my older Froyo phone in the very rudimentary Basic4Android. Copying files under root privileges was part of this process. Fairly easy if you find the right coding examples in whatever your development platform of choice.
xdajunkman said:
Yes, this is possible. I wrote an app that flashes the recovery partition for my older Froyo phone in the very rudimentary Basic4Android. Copying files under root privileges was part of this process. Fairly easy if you find the right coding examples in whatever your development platform of choice.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So one of the problems is its not really copying. Its more of an extraction from one place to another. We are required to use dd, and fdisk(for formatting).
GREAT! I was worried updates would be to complicated for people
Sent from my Nook Tablet using xda premium
... and I was worried that I might have to wipe my NT clean again to get the updates. After a week with this wonderful upgrade, I've got a LOT of customization I don't want to lose...
Whoops, wrong button with the thanks. Anyway, it occurs to me you could just have people run a script from a terminal emulator. That would probably be the simplest way to do it. Make an Update folder on the SD card, add it to the PATH by default, and users could just copy over the update files and run the script. Just a thought.
Sycobob said:
Whoops, wrong button with the thanks. Anyway, it occurs to me you could just have people run a script from a terminal emulator. That would probably be the simplest way to do it. Make an Update folder on the SD card, add it to the PATH by default, and users could just copy over the update files and run the script. Just a thought.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Has to be simple, something like copy an update.zip onto the SD card then run the apk which will automatically run the update in the zip But my knowledge of such things is limited so I need help there
Same process. With the above method, the user would only have to copy over the file, open a terminal, and type 'update'. With the apk idea you just have to add a little more time for someone to actually write the app (not that it would take too long).
Sycobob said:
Same process. With the above method, the user would only have to copy over the file, open a terminal, and type 'update'. With the apk idea you just have to add a little more time for someone to actually write the app (not that it would take too long).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmm.... that sounds good.
Anybody know how to actually implement it ?
Dammit, idk why I keep hitting the thanks button thinking it's reply >.>
Anyway, it's just a matter of setting the PATH variable to include /sdcard/Update/ or something similar. To make an actual update, make a folder called Update, fill it with all the files that need to be copied over (probably in a directory structure), and write a script that actually copies everything over. You'll need to make sure sh is in /system/bin (I think it is by default).
You could zip the the files as well, using gunzip (busybox?) to extract them before copying them, then deleting them when you're done, just to keep it cleaner for the user.
The only downside to all this is that I don't know how you would flash a kernel.
Sycobob said:
Dammit, idk why I keep hitting the thanks button thinking it's reply >.>
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That makes two of us!
Sycobob said:
Anyway, it's just a matter of setting the PATH variable to include /sdcard/Update/ or something similar. To make an actual update, make a folder called Update, fill it with all the files that need to be copied over (probably in a directory structure), and write a script that actually copies everything over. You'll need to make sure sh is in /system/bin (I think it is by default).
You could zip the the files as well, using gunzip (busybox?) to extract them before copying them, then deleting them when you're done, just to keep it cleaner for the user.The only downside to all this is that I don't know how you would flash a kernel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm guessing you'd just flash it as usual, surely that one is the easiest? Copying stuff to boot partition would hopefully be just as simple, I was mainly worried about updating system files. I could do with building one for the current update to test the theory!

[Q] v1.4.3 and Framework_res.apk

I know that I ask a lot of questions, some of them just a bit bonehead. I really appreciate everyones help here.
So, I finally for 1.4.3 running, rooted it, restored my backup from titanium backup. I have noticed, however, that when Installed my custom resources like SystemUI.apk and framework_res.apk there are a few little bugs here and there in the text it displays...
For instance, when you hit the menu button and it displays the block of buttons for some apps (like ADW / ADW EX and Titanium Backup) the arrow that used to say "More" now says "Allows the Application to set an alarm in an" and then it trails off. Obviously this is a mistake, probably they changed some reference between files in the framework folder. Additionally, the "Set as Default" now displays a bunch of %'s and letters as if, again, some reference is bad.
I like running the current software, these are minor issues. I'm sure they can be fixed, just not sure how. I was kind of stupid and didn't make a backup of my original framework_res.apk and SystemUI.apk files from the Nook after I updated but before I replaced them. Stupid of me, I know. I assumed from the file dates that nothing was changed. So, I can't really go back to the originals until I get it sorted out.
Anyone have any suggestions? If perhaps someone who has updated to 1.4.3 could send me those two files so I could make the mods myself on the new APK files? I'm almost positive it is framework_res.apk that is the culprit.
Does anyone have framework_res.apk from v1.4.3?
titanshadow said:
Does anyone have framework_res.apk from v1.4.3?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can just get the full 1.4.3 update zip from B&N yourself, unpack the zip, and it's all there: http://su.barnesandnoble.com/nook/nooktablet/1.4.3/nZU6wA3e3CCckqXRQI6gqoT0ZKAA8MujlFdXFU08/nooktablet_1_4_3_update.zip
(I found that by looking here first: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/Software-Updates-NOOK-Tablet/379003187/)
lack_android said:
You can just get the full 1.4.3 update zip from B&N yourself, unpack the zip, and it's all there: http://su.barnesandnoble.com/nook/n...0ZKAA8MujlFdXFU08/nooktablet_1_4_3_update.zip
(I found that by looking here first: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/Software-Updates-NOOK-Tablet/379003187/)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
To my knowledge you can't just unpack them anymore, I tried and I just got a large archive file that I didn't have anything to decompress. Do you know what program to use to unpack the archive inside the zip?
titanshadow said:
To my knowledge you can't just unpack them anymore, I tried and I just got a large archive file that I didn't have anything to decompress. Do you know what program to use to unpack the archive inside the zip?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I believe it is '7zip' to the rescue.
Finally got it... Now trying to figure out how to modify it, the contents are a lot different...

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