Friday 5 December 2014

How I fixed bootloop on my Nexus without loosing data

I was playing around with framework-res.apk and SystemUI.apk to get Ambient Display on my Nexus 4. When I restarted my phone, it seemed to have stuck in a bootloop. I knew that factory reset might've worked. But I didn't want to lose any data.

Fortunately adb was working. When I did adb logcat , it was logging an error saying:
 /system/framework/framework-res.apk is neither a file nor a folder (type=0)

I realized that there was some problem with permissions of that file. I used adb shell and changed the permission of framework-res.apk and SystemUI.apk to 0644. But this was of no use. However I came to know that if I could somehow reset /system partition the problem would be solved.


  • So I downloaded the factory image of my phone. For nexus devices it is available here
  • Extract the contents of the image-xxxx-xxxx.zip to get the file system.img.
  • Then ran the following:
    adb reboot bootloader
    fastboot flash system system.img
  • This will wipe the /system partition and reset it without touching any other partitions. Hence you will not lose any data.
  • Restart. It took a while to start the phone completely. But it solved the problem!
This is how I was able to reset my framework-res.apk and SystemUI.apk!


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