Install Android 4.2 on Galaxy Nexus

14 November, 2012 — android — 2 min read

Android 4.2 is out for couple of days now. Yesterday morning I got OTA notification to upgrade it on my Galaxy Nexus GSM. As excited I could be, I went for it, mobile rebooted to recovery mode. After a bit of cranking and all, boom! it failed to update the system with some error message. I was like WTF! I rebooted the phone and I was anticipating that it would have some how installed 4.2 Alas, no that was not the case. I tried OTA couple of times again but in vain. So resorted to Google and found that OTA packages are available to download. Followed the article on slashgear and XDA forum. All that failed I kept on getting error message assert failed : apply_patch_check ("/system/build.prop" something like that. I tried something new this time, I decided to install factory image. List of factory images for nexus device is found at Google Nexus site I went for 4.2 (JOP40C). Yes this is a 261+ MB in size.

In short, if you follow the steps given below you should be able to update your GNex to 4.2 without rooting it or OEM unlock. You don't even need to install CWM (clockworkmod) etc.

Prerequisite

I am using ubuntu 12.04 with android SDK installed. Which implies you would have adb and fastboot available. You can check for that in platform-tools folder in your android sdk path. On Ubuntu I suppose you don't need to install any sort of device drivers.

These steps may work on Windows as well, although with minor modification, you should have device drivers, adb and fastboot installed. Note that tz file has .bat file. So I assume if you have adb and fastboot in System Path. All you need to do is run flash-all.bat from cmd prompt.

Steps Involved

Please note that these steps would wipe out all the data from your phone. Consider taking a backup of data. This may even brick your phone.

Unzip content of takju-jop40c-factory-1a47c890.tgz
boot your phone to bootloader
install bootloader
reboot to bootloader
flash takju image to phone

Essentially above steps are in flash-all.sh file. flash-all.sh did not work for me because for some reason fastboot fires up for me only when I sudo.

In short you would fire following commands in the sequence below

1fastboot flash bootloader bootloader-maguro-primelc03.img
2fastboot reboot-bootloader
3fastboot flash radio radio-maguro-i9250xxlh1.img
4fastboot reboot-bootloader
5fastboot -w update image-takju-jop40c.zip

I copied the content of takju-jop40c-factory-1a47c890.tgz to platform-tools folder before starting up with the above commands for ease of referencing the files.

log of my system below for reference.

1$ adb reboot-bootloader
2
3    $ sudo ./fastboot flash bootloader bootloader-maguro-primelc03.img
4    sending 'bootloader' (2308 KB)...
5    OKAY [  0.581s]
6    writing 'bootloader'...
7    OKAY [  0.653s]
8    finished. total time: 1.234s
9
10    $ sudo ./fastboot reboot-bootloader
11    rebooting into bootloader...
12    OKAY [  0.006s]
13    finished. total time: 0.006s
14
15    $ sudo ./fastboot flash radio radio-maguro-i9250xxlh1.img
16    sending 'radio' (12288 KB)...
17    OKAY [  3.092s]
18    writing 'radio'...
19    OKAY [  1.638s]
20    finished. total time: 4.730s
21
22    $ sudo ./fastboot reboot-bootloader
23    rebooting into bootloader...
24    OKAY [  0.006s]
25    finished. total time: 0.006s
26
27
28    $ sudo ./fastboot -w update image-takju-jop40c.zip
29    archive does not contain 'boot.sig'
30    archive does not contain 'recovery.sig'
31    archive does not contain 'system.sig'
32    --------------------------------------------
33    Bootloader Version...: PRIMELC03
34    Baseband Version.....: I9250XXLH1
35    Serial Number........: 0149C7A508017004
36    --------------------------------------------
37    checking product...
38    OKAY [  0.007s]
39    checking version-bootloader...
40    OKAY [  0.008s]
41    checking version-baseband...
42    OKAY [  0.008s]
43    sending 'boot' (4400 KB)...
44    OKAY [  1.108s]
45    writing 'boot'...
46    OKAY [  0.398s]
47    sending 'recovery' (4900 KB)...
48    OKAY [  1.248s]
49    writing 'recovery'...
50    OKAY [  0.707s]
51    sending 'system' (436723 KB)...
52
53    OKAY [110.300s]
54    writing 'system'...
55    OKAY [ 42.772s]
56    erasing 'userdata'...
57    OKAY [  1.122s]
58    formatting 'userdata' partition...
59    Creating filesystem with parameters:
60        Size: 14539534336
61        Block size: 4096
62        Blocks per group: 32768
63        Inodes per group: 8144
64        Inode size: 256
65        Journal blocks: 32768
66        Label:
67        Blocks: 3549691
68        Block groups: 109
69        Reserved block group size: 871
70    Created filesystem with 11/887696 inodes and 97200/3549691 blocks
71    sending 'userdata' (137559 KB)...
72    writing 'userdata'...
73    OKAY [ 46.028s]
74    erasing 'cache'...
75    OKAY [  0.044s]
76    formatting 'cache' partition...
77    Creating filesystem with parameters:
78        Size: 452984832
79        Block size: 4096
80        Blocks per group: 32768
81        Inodes per group: 6912
82        Inode size: 256
83        Journal blocks: 1728
84        Label:
85        Blocks: 110592
86        Block groups: 4
87        Reserved block group size: 31
88    Created filesystem with 11/27648 inodes and 3566/110592 blocks
89    sending 'cache' (8832 KB)...
90    writing 'cache'...
91    OKAY [  4.060s]
92    rebooting...
93
94    finished. total time: 207.843s

After completion phone would reboot automatically. Please leave a comment if you this works for you or not.