My kids have been tracing letters on my wife's phone for a while, this runs into trouble when both of them want to do letters and she's only got the one phone. I've got this Nook Tablet lying around, it's been rooted to get access to full Google play store so putting the app on there should be a quick fix for this.
Had I known this would take me almost a week I might not have agreed so readily.
I should explain, I'm not typically so dense that I can't install things from an app store. The Nook Tablets don't have access to the full Google Market. If you had an interest in buying apps without a hefty B&N markup you have to root it, which I had done. The trouble comes from the poor job I did of it. I rooted the tablet but didn't replace the B&N operating system just changed the launcher. This crude effort sufficed, but left the devices with a few quirks.
For what I wanted the tablet for this was good enough, and worked fine until now. Go into Google Play and tell it to install the letter tracing app, it tells me error 409. There are a number of forum threads about this all with a variety of helpful suggestions from deleting the Google account to ceremonially cleansing the device. I couldn't get any of them to work, the app stubbornly refused to install.
Fine, I'll just have to do a more thorough rooting and install to a modern version of Android. I grab a nightly build of Cyanogenmod and reboot into recovery mode to try and install it. ClockworkMod fails to complete the install stating that there's an error in the file. It's a nightly build not expected to be perfect, I'll just try a stable release. I reboot the Nook to copy another Cyanogen install over, instead of the B&N loading screen it shows the Cyanogen boot loader, apparently some portion of that install worked. Then the screen goes dark for a bit and that boot loader appears again, this repeats a few times. I can see no way past the bootlooping and I have to copy the files onto the SD card via my phone. I really need to get a card reader for my computer.
I swap SD cards for a while and eventually get what I need onto the Nook. The 10.1 version of Cyanogen installs fine according to CWM. Then I restart, the boot loader rolls past and I see the Cyanogen loading animation for a bit, then it stops abruptly and nothing else happens. It seems I've done something really bad to my tablet.
The simplest way to clean up this mess is to factory reset the Nook and start clean. I quickly find this forum thread with clear instructions. There's even links to the files I'll need, well except for the disk imager that link was broken. Fortunately it was easy to find elsewhere. Then it dawns on me that my home machine is running Debian, win32-anything isn't going to do me any good. It's a disk image right? That's the sort of thing the dd command does, so I ought to be able to work around this.
SD card in the phone, connect it to the Debian machine and run the command, then wait. And wait. It takes a good 15 minutes to copy the image over, this seems excessive. It doesn't report an error though, maybe going through the phone slowed things down. Put the card in the Nook and reboot back into CWM. The Nook doesn't acknowledge there's a card installed. I put the card back in the phone, it says the SD card is corrupt and suggests formatting it. I let it do the format, and then it refuses to mount the card repeatedly saying it's corrupt and needs formatted. This is probably bad news for the card.
I borrow the wife's laptop which has Windows on it, install the disk image, connect the phone with my other SD card in it and have it start copying the image. Again it takes a good 15 minutes and I'm annoyed that card readers aren't standard on laptops yet. Into the Nook it goes, and just like before the Nook pretends no card is inserted. A touch nervously I put the card into the phone again, yup it's helpfully suggesting a format. This is how I learned that pushing disk images to a memory card through a phone is a bad idea.
My work laptop has a card reader on it, so at lunch the next day I cross my fingers and stuff in one of the cards I ruined. It gives me good news, the partition tables have been destroyed, but the disks are otherwise unharmed. A format later and they are ready to take that disk image. Through a proper card reader it takes three minutes to copy the image. I try it in the Nook, and just like the instructions said it goes through the removal of all my customizations and returns it to how B&N intended.
Ok, so the tablet will boot up again, but there's no hope of installing the letters app. Let's try and root it again. Cyanogem has good instructions for accomplishing this. So I've got it rooted and am about to install a nightly build again. CWM stops me again saying there is an error in the file. Awesome, I'm pretty much back where I started now.
I do some Googling and discover that I need a newer version of CWM to install Cyanogen 10.2. Most of those same pages lead me here to get that, for some reason I can't reach any of the downloads linked there.
Giving up on the nightly again I try my luck with the 10.1 build again. CWM says it's successful again, and I reboot. I see the loading animation, which is a spinning circle. It keeps spinning, doesn't crash and reboot the device or freeze up, maybe this is working! I let it keep spinning, and in turn it goes right on spinning away. Optimistically I let it do so for a good 20 minutes before admitting its not really loading and turn it off.
Some more searching turns up a forum thread discussing this. It suggests some fixes within CWM. Following these suggestions I do a factory wipe, clear the dalvik cache, and fix the permissions. Reboot, spinning loading screen, then all of a sudden it wants me to create a Cyanogen account. Success! I've finally got a fully working operating system on here.
It asks me to setup my Google account and immediately begins installing all the apps I've purchased. I don't really want all of those on here. But that's not important, somewhere in the pile of stuff it installed it added the tracing letters app! Finally the boys will stop fighting over who gets to draw letters.
No comments:
Post a Comment