Android Recovery

Hello friends...After a long time again getting a chance to talk on technology. My today’s blog is for mainly two types of people. Firstly those who are newbie like me to this technology about which i will discuss today and secondly for those who like to play with their cell-phones and upgrading their cell-phones.

Recovery is the feature provided to every android phone. Recovery is the concept which deals with the restoring the data back when phone failure occurs. Recovery is the feature which is provided in every Android phone. All Android devices ship with a recovery environment preinstalled. This recovery software can be used to restore the device to factory default settings, update its operating system, and perform other diagnostic tasks.

Fig1: Recovery mode

Before this let us first put a light on the two mostly used recoveries. Mainly there are two types of recoveries. The ROM which comes along with the phone i.e. they are in built such types of recovery is called as “Stock recovery”. Android devices come with Google’s recovery environment, which is often referred to as the “stock recovery.” Stock recovery is also called as 3e. Stock recovery has the features like wipe cache, Dalvik cache, reset factory settings. The stock recovery is a minimal, limited system. It’s designed to be ignored, and it can generally only flash OTA updates and ROMs provided by the device’s manufacturer, not third-party ROMs.  Stock ROM has less functionality. For this reason we use the ROM called as “Custom ROM”.

Fig2: Recovery screen

A custom recovery is a third-party recovery environment. Flashing this recovery environment onto your device replaces the default, stock recovery environment with a third-party, customized recovery environment.  A custom recovery environment does same things as the stock Android recovery does but in addition it provides some extra features. Custom recoveries have the ability to create and restore device backups. Custom recoveries allow installing custom ROMs.

                                               Fig3: Stock Recovery screen

Although CWM and TWRP are the two most popular custom recoveries, but other custom recoveries may be available for some devices.

Custom recoveries mainly fall in various categories:

1)     ClockworkMod Recovery (CWM):

CVM is the most widely used and popular recovery. It offers an application called as “ROM MANAGER”, which allows easily browsing and installing custom ROMs. CVM can restore and create. It is supported by most of the devices. CVM is widely used recovery.

Features of custom recovery:

1)     Fix permissions.

2)     Wipe cache, Dalvik cache.

3)     Wipe data.

4)     Reset factory settings

5)     Nandroid backup and restore.

6)     Install zips from internal or external sources.

7)     Used to install custom kernels or custom ROMs.

8)     Mounting.

9)     Formatting system partitions.

10)Preload.

How to install these custom ROMs:

Installing ROM varies from devices to devices. It depends on the properties of the device. Procedure for installing the custom ROM suiting your phone you can Google your model number and name.

Fig4: ROM manager screen

Purpose of custom recovery:

Custom recoveries are most useful while installing custom ROMs on device, as they provide backup, restore, and ROM-flashing features you’ll need. The device boot loader needs to be unlocked. Android offer a way to create full device backups, although this feature is hidden and requires using an adb command. One need not unlock the boot loader, install a custom ROM, or even root device to create or restore a full backup. 

 Fig5: Custom based recovery screen

2)     Team win recovery(TWRP):

Team Win Recovery project is a touch-based recovery environment. TWRP environment has a touch-based interface which one can use by tapping his fingers on on-screen buttons. TWRP even supports themes. TWRP offers ROM installation and backup features.

Fig6: TWRP based recovery

I hope the newbie like me are aware now of the what all the Android recovery consists of and its well known types. Last but not the least for this blog i would like to thank my friend Sagar R Aradwad for guiding me a walkthrough by giving a live demo of all the stages of custom recovery on my cell phone.

APTonCD – Create Backup of Any Installed Packages in Ubuntu

The most common method that is used to carry out installation of any sort of additional packages in Ubuntu is the apt-get. The apt-get following the name of the software package you specified to install, it searches for that particular software from the Internet and if found, apt-get downloads and installs it on your system. But there is a tool which allows you to install the download packages on your system without downloading. The tool named, APTonCd, which is a graphical tool that allows you to create one or more CDs or DVDs of all the packages that you’ve downloaded via apt-get and thus creates a removal repository that you can use on other computers with a single action. The main advantage of APTonCD is that you don’t have to download the packages again if you are doing a fresh installation on your or other systems. You can restore the previously installed programs easily. Let’s see how we can do this in Ubuntu.

Installation:

First you have to install APTonCD.

You can install APTonCD from the Ubuntu Software Center.

                                         Fig1.Search APTonCD from Ubuntu Software Center

Or you can install it through your terminal. Run the following command:

         sudo apt-get install aptoncd

                  Fig2.Install APTonCD through terminal

Once installation is complete, you can launch it from the Dash.                             

                                                      Fig3.Launch APTonCD from Dash             

Backing up Packages:

After you launch it, you can see the following window. Click “Create” button to create a disc with your downloaded, cached deb packages on it. This copies packages from your APT cache located in the /var/cache/apt/archives/directory to the disc.

                                                Fig4.Starting screen to Create the backup.  

Next step is to select the packages which you would like to write to the disk. By default it selects all the packages but you can deselect them if you don’t want those packages to be written on the disc. And also you can add some additional packages you want by clicking the Add button.

                                                      Fig5.Selecting the packages.   

Once you have selected your packages then click the Burn button.

After you get a Window that allows you to select a CD or DVD image, give it a name and the location for the ISO image file, and select optionally create a meta-package.

                                          Fig6.Specifying the installation disc properties.

Click the Apply button and APTonCD will create an ISO image at the location you specified.                                               

                                                 Fig7.Creating the ISO image.


                                                      Fig8.Scanning the packages.

Once the image is created, you can have APTonCD launch a disc-burning application, Such as Brasero, to burn it to a disc immediately. You can burn the ISO image later also. And if you don’t have a disc drive, then there is nothing to worry, you can also save the ISO image as a file and you can transport it using a USB drive between computers.

                                                     Fig9.Burning the packages to the disc

Installing All Packages:

If you burnt the image to disc, you can insert it into your drive by opening it in a file manager window, and double-click the package named ”aptoncd-metapackage” to install it. This will install all packages available on the disc. The package will not be present if you didn’t have APTonCD create a meta-package.

                                                       Fig10.Selecting the aptoncd-metapackage.

If you have not burn into a disc and you have just an ISO image then you can mount it as a disc and install the packages from it.

Adding a Disc as a Repository:

The File -> Add CD/DVD option in APTonCD adds the disc to APT as a software source. The disc will be used as a repository in APT, so you can install packages from it using Synaptic, apt-get, or any other package management tools, even if you’re offline.

                                             Fig11.Adding CD or DVD as APT source.

Restoring Packages to Cache:

Before you click on the Load Button on the restore screen, you have to install the hal package on your system. To do so, run the following command:

                 sudo apt-get install hal

                   Fig12.Installing the hal packages.

Restart APTonCD after running this command and you’ll be able to restore packages by Restore button. You can restore packages to any of your system.

                                                       Fig13.Load the packages.

Use the Load button on the Restore screen to specify a disc drive or ISO image file.

                                                 Fig14.Selecting an ISO image.