Flashing Android 5.0 factory image "missing system.img" error

[Joe]

A lot of people are running into a "missing system.img" error when trying to flash the Android 5.0 factory image. After struggling with it for over an hour I found a solution.

All you have to do is flash the .img files manually.

When you extract the factory image you'll have a .zip file. Unzip that and you'll see all the .img files. Move the radio and bootloader .img files into the same place you just extracted the zip. Now it's just a matter of running commands.

fastboot flash bootloader <bootloader file name here>.img

fastboot flash radio <radio file name here>.img

fastboot reboot-bootloader

fastboot flash recovery recovery.img

fastboot flash boot boot.img

fastboot flash system system.img (this one will take the longest)

To perform a full wipe do this:​

fastboot flash cache cache.img

fastboot flash userdata userdata.img​

That's it. Reboot your phone

fastboot reboot​

Has anyone else ran into this error?

 

[Rxpert83]

I've always flashed manually. Didn't have any issues once I ensured a good download

 

[scythefwd]

I had a few missing sig files, but all the img files were present. Then again, I was lazy and just did a flash-all.bat ...

 

[BynoUK]

I had a brief moment where I'd wiped the phone completely and couldn't flash the image, turned out in the end the flash-all.bat was for the N10 image I'd flashed previously lol!!

 

[jj14x]

I had a brief moment where I'd wiped the phone completely and couldn't flash the image, turned out in the end the flash-all.bat was for the N10 image I'd flashed previously lol!!

Whew! And here I thought I was the only one who tried to flash the N5 image onto my N5 (after downloading both), and trying about 5 times before realizing what I had done wrong!!

And then, the flash-all for the N5 failed making me check (what I was flashing) over and over again before trying to flash the individual files. Sheeeeeesh!