Lindsay Wilson Dec 2012 - Mar 2013
lindsay@imajeenyus.com

I got a couple of cheap Chinese 7" Android tablets from EBay in Dec. 2012 and have been playing around with them, trying to understand things like flashing firmware, recovery mode, partitions etc. Most of this was motivated by my bricking one tablet and then trying to find a way of copying the firmware from the other.

The overall goal was to create a complete Livesuit firmware image that I could use to restore my bricked tablet to its original state.

If you have any questions about your own tablet, then please note that, although these tablets superficially appear similar, there are often huge differences in the firmware, so what I've described in these pages may not work. The sum total of my knowledge is here, so if you don't see it here, I probably don't know about it!

Translating Chinese. Some of the files contain Chinese characters. The best way to figure these out is to open the file in Chrome, choose a Chinese character encoding (I used simplified) then get Google to translate it.

Contents

General

• Intro - origin of tablet, photos, specifications.
• Was this tablet the best choice? / What if you have a different tablet?
• Handy tools
• Image converter program for BGRA and RGB565 images
• build.prop files
• Taking screenshots
• Safely removing the SD card
• Customising graphics (bootloader, splash screen, bootanimation.zip)
• Video of boot process

Partition and image stuff

• Is there any difference between cat and dd?
• Recovery partition - difference between stock and CWM, and how to flash CWM
• Unpacking and repacking CWM recovery image (also applies to boot image)
• Partitions - comparison of sizes between stock ROM and Mum's tablet
• Partitions - summary of what partitions exist
• Partitions - detailed look at each one
• Backup and restore options

Livesuit-related

• What is a LiveSuit image?
• Livesuit driver not recognized
• Stock LiveSuit ROM image
• Unpacking and repacking
• Use of simg2img and mkuserimg (for sparse partitions)
• Detailed look at the partition files
• fex2bin and bin2fex - purpose of script.bin
• A look at COMMON_SYS_CONFIG000000
• Creating a LiveSuit image for my tablet