I made a series of videos... never rooted my nexus. You don't need to. You just need to unlock the bootloader, but that will wipe your phone. Its why everyone here recommended unlocking the bootloader from day 1. Updating from 4.0.2 to 4.0.4 doesn't require a wipe, so if you unlocked your bootloader, you will keep all your info.
First, unlock the bootloader. You can do this on any computer (windows, mac, linux). My videos are done on mac, but the general process is exactly the same.
Download the sdk and install it from
Android Developers
next, you will need to get fastboot for your computer. You can google and download it, or if you're tech savvy, you can compile it on your own (I would just download it, its a small file). Once you have it downloaded, place it in your platform-tools folder (you must run android.exe or equivalent to get the sdk tools which is how this folder is downloaded to your computer)
Once you have those, then you can unlock the bootloader. Follow this tutorial. If you are using a windows machine, use command prompt (type cmd in the start menu). Remember where you have the sdk downloaded to. I have mine in c:\ on my desktop, so my code for navigating to it would be:
Code:
cd c:\android-sdk-windows\platform-tools
the only other difference from my video is wherever is put "./" you leave out
for example,
Mac code:
is Windows code:
Here's the video:
Click to view quoted video
Once you've done that, you can update immediately afterwards
Download the update file and put it on your phone
Download a toro (verizon galaxy nexus code name) specific clockwork mod recovery, I used the new touch recovery. Place the recovery image (i renamed mine to recovery.img) into that platform-tools folder
code for this is really simple:
Code:
adb reboot bootloader
fastboot boot recovery.img
here's that video:
Click to view quoted video