Restoring to default Galaxy Nexus firmware, or upgrading to the latest Android release from Google

April 14, 2012 Chilling_Silence How-To's / Guides / Tech info

A couple of people have asked me after trying CyanogenMod or MIUI how they can restore back to the latest official builds from Google.

Thankfully it’s nice and easy!

No screenshots, but we’ll dive right in and get moving, it should only take 2-3 minutes once you’ve got all the files.

Before we begin, now is a good time to backup your SMS messages using SMS Backup & Restore: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore

It’ll save it to a .xml file on your phone that you can easily restore afterwards. Copy this off your phone to your PC, as everything will be *wiped*. By wiped I mean *everything*, completely 100% gone from your phone.

So we’ll start by grabbing Fastboot & ADB. These are required for flashing your phone back, so rather than make you download the full SDK and stuff, I’ve got them here in a small .zip file: fastboot-adb

It’s approx 275KB so won’t take long.

Now you need to go here and get the official firmware from Google:

http://code.google.com/android/nexus/images.html#yakjuimm76d

This will take you straight to the part of the page with ICS 4.0.4, which was the latest at the time of writing. This download is much bigger, approx 186MB.

Download it and extract it to your C: Drive. You should then have a directory called “yakju-imm76d”. You’ll want to extract the fastboot-adb.zip file to that same directory.

Now, get your phone turned fully off. Give it a second or two, then you’re going to boot in to Fastboot mode by holding the Vol-Down, Vol-Up and the Power button. Keep them all held down until you see this:

Perfect! Plug your phone in and it’s time to get flashing.

Fire up a command prompt. In Win7 click on the start button then type “cmd”. In WinXP click Start –> Run –> cmd

Now type:

cd \yakju-imm76d

If you type “dir” you should see the listing of all your files, the fastboot & adb files, as well as a few firmware files for your phone. Perfect, you’re in the right place.

Now, type:

fastboot flash bootloader bootloader-maguro-primela03.img

Watch down the bottom of your phone as you type this and you’ll see a very small line with information about its progress. It’ll only take a couple of seconds.

Then type:

fastboot reboot-bootloader

Cool, your phone is now rebooting with the updated bootloader, it should only take 3-4 seconds to reboot. Now we flash the Radio with:

fastboot flash radio radio-maguro-i9250xxla02.img

Then reboot the phone again with:

fastboot reboot-bootloader

Give it a couple of seconds to come back up. Finally we’re about to flash the actual firmware, by typing this:

fastboot -w update image-yakju-imm76d.zip

That should be it, it’ll take a moment or two and you’re all done and dusted!

Don’t forget to reinstall SMS Backup & Restore from the Play Store to restore your SMS messages.

ADB, Android, CyanogenMod, Factory restore, Fastboot,

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