Installing CyanogenMod on a Galaxy Nexus (GSM)
I just installed CyanogenMod on my Galaxy Nexus phone. There is an official guide; here is my summary of what you need to do.
- Backup your data
- The process will reset your phone, so you need to back up all your data. An useful open-source program to take care of (part of) this is Slight backup.
- Retrieve fastboot
- Follow these instructions to install fastboot. I'm not sure that this was entirely straightforward, but I did this long ago so I'm not really sure. fastboot is now packaged for Debian so it is much simpler to install: apt-get install android-tools-fastboot.
- Unlock the bootloader
- Power down the device, and press the power, volume up and volume down
buttons simultaneously for a few seconds. You will thus reach the bootloader.
Connect the USB cable and run
fastboot oem unlock
, and confirm. This will reset the device and unlock the bootloader. - Retrieve and run ClockworkMod
- I trust the
official guide to have an up-to-date ClockworkMod download link. This being
said, you don't need to keep ClockworkMod on your device: you can just boot it
as needed. To do so, get to the bootloader like in the previous section, and run
fastboot boot CLOCKWORK
whereCLOCKWORK
is the ClockworkMod image file. - Perform a backup
- Use ClockworkMod to back up the device before installing anything else, and
use
adb
to retrieve the backup to your computer. - Format all partitions
- This is an important step missing from the official guide: you should format
/cache
,/system
and/data
before installing CyanogenMod. Otherwise, in my case, CyanogenMod was stuck at the boot animation andadb logcat
seemed to suggest that it had to do with a NullPointerException while reading the existing settings. - Retrieve CyanogenMod
- Download a CyanogenMod image from this page. I first thought I'd go with a stable version, but I picked the latest nightly as of this writing (cm-10-20120923-NIGHTLY-maguro.zip) and had no problems with it yet.
- Install CyanogenMod
- Use adb to push the downloaded image to the sdcard folder on the device, and install the image using ClockworkMod.