ROM's & OTA's

[TropicalSammich]

What actually occurs if you have a customer ROM, and download/install a carrier/Google OTA without going back to stock first?

Does the update take precedence and revert it back to OEM? Does the device Brick? or does the OTA just not work?

Yesterday i downloaded the 6.2 Galaxy Nexus Toolkit (which is awesome BTW), and went as far as unlocking the boot loader & rooting.

I did the backups & restores, all worked flawlessly.

But I've yet to dive into the ROM situation, which would require a wipe each time.

Seems a bit of work/hassle to go back to stock for an OTA, then await ROM compatibility update before flashing again??

I would like to take advantage of the OTA's since they are usually very beneficial, and having a Galaxy Nexus, should get the OTA's before other skinned android handsets.


Any answers or comments? Thanks!

 

[Paul627g]

If your just rooted and CWM recovery installed the OTA update may in fact work and in the end you would just loose your recovery.

Once you move onto installing a ROM or custom kernel you normally loose the ability to receive OTA updates and if it does give you the option to do so it will normally fail on installation.

As for your concern on doing "wipes" every time you update or switch ROMs. Normally rule of thumb is you do a full wipe before flashing a new ROM. Many people do what they call a dirty flash and just wipe dalvik cache/cache partition only and then flash the ROM. This then retains most of their settings/info/data so they don't have to setup everything again. If you start getting weird FC's (force closings) etc, then you will have to do the full wipe anyways but the former is normally done without problems to veteran ROM flashers.

 

[TropicalSammich]

If your just rooted and CWM recovery installed the OTA update may in fact work and in the end you would just loose your recovery.

Once you move onto installing a ROM or custom kernel you normally loose the ability to receive OTA updates and if it does give you the option to do so it will normally fail on installation.

As for your concern on doing "wipes" every time you update or switch ROMs. Normally rule of thumb is you do a full wipe before flashing a new ROM. Many people do what they call a dirty flash and just wipe dalvik cache/cache partition only and then flash the ROM. This then retains most of their settings/info/data so they don't have to setup everything again. If you start getting weird FC's (force closings) etc, then you will have to do the full wipe anyways but the former is normally done without problems to veteran ROM flashers.

Thanks for the input.

Should probably find out what a CWM recovery is. Like i said, i just installed the toolkit, did the boot loader & root, and that's it.

I remember webOS homebrew had much less thought process, more tools doing the work, and right on the phone itself without a PC.

So only reason I'm this far is because of the toolkit.

But i really don't want to get into the ROM game just yet, since its a little more involved, i don't want to screw up the phone. And i like OTA's...

 

[Paul627g]

CWM=ClockWorkRecovery

Its the standard in custom recoveries. It takes the place of your stock recovery which only allows you to do a factory wipe and install factory/carrier/manufacture approved updates via using an "update.zip"

CWM recovery is what we use to flash ROMs, themes, kernels, mods, etc. It also allows you to do backups and restores, system wipes/data/cache/dalvik. Also has other handy little build in tools like wiping your battery stats, fixing (file) permission settings and other things.

There are variants of the CWM recovery which are custom made for certain devices like the Optimus and others but the most well known and supported is CWM.