• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Root Help a Nook Noob

F

flu13

Android Enthusiast
I just got my NC, and I really want to turn it into something great. With the help of this site, SDX, and XDA, my phone is pretty awesome, and now I want the same for the Nook.

There seem to be a lot of options, though. Colchiro has suggested CM7, Phiremod, and not even rooting and having a custom CWR (no idea what that stands for) boot image. This is a lot to take in. What do other users think is best?

Also, I see a lot of things talking about doing things by loading stuff onto a micro SD card. Does the size of the card matter? Does the speed of the card matter?

And I also think I'm running into a lot of slightly outdated information. Reading the Phiremod instructions, it says that you must have the 1.0.1 or 1.1.0 firmware, and to upgrade if you have 1.0.0. Well, I have 1.2.0, so I'm not sure if the instructions apply or not.

Not to mention, those same instructions make some assumptions. They mention booting into ClockworkMod Recovery from ROM Manager...but with a virgin Nook, I don't know how to even get those things.

I appreciate any guidance folks around here can give me.
 
There are basically three ways you can go. The first is to create a bootable SD card with an available iteration of Android. This is the easiest and least dangerous method to try Android on your nook color.

This is a pretty good tutorial.

This way if you can see how Android performs on the Nook Color without actually changing anything. The NC is designed to look at the SD card first so if it is bootable, it will use that OS and ignore the internal memory. The upside is if you want to go back to stock, you just take out the SD card and reboot. The downside is that SD cards can be a little slow and limit the amount of memory available without creating multiple partitions on the card, but that's a bit more advanced.

The second way is to root the nook and add a launcher , market and various apps to the existing Nook OS to make it more like a full fledged tablet. The most popular way is to use Autonooter, but that currently is only available for 1.0 and 1.1 of B&N Nook OS. For 1.2 you need to follow the manualnooter proceedures, which is really the same as autonooter without packaging it into one file.

This is how you do it.

I have done this and find it works great for my needs.

The final way is flash a custom ROM to the Nook which completely removes the B&N Nook software. Phiremod and CM7 are the most popular. "Best" is up to the individual user. I have not done this, so i really can't recommend one rom over another or vouch for which works most reliably/fastest/fully featured depending on which is your goal.
 
Thanks, Lunatic.

Another question... My Nook has the blue sticker which I guess indicates that the internal memory is partitioned differently. Is that good or bad?
 
flu13 said:
Thanks, Lunatic.

Another question... My Nook has the blue sticker which I guess indicates that the internal memory is partitioned differently. Is that good or bad?
Click to expand...

It's different. I found a very good explanation in the B&N forums buy a member named Nallia. It wasn't convenient to post a link, so I'll just copy the pertinent parts.

" The new NOOK Colors are coming with a different partition than the old ones. It used to be that they were partitioned to have a 3GB secure area that was reserved by B&N for the OS and their use. After the app store opened about 900MB in that secure partition was set aside for apps. It was being filled up fast by some who were buying a lot of the children's interactive book apps. B&N then created a new partition system that places 7GB of the internal memory into that secure partition, leaving 1GB for sideloaded content.

One of the annoyances of this is the fact that the original 5GB for owner use was used for B&N ebooks and sideloaded content. In the new partition, B&N ebooks now go into the secure area along with apps. So you can no longer see them when you connect your NC to your computer. Also, since they have not put in any indicator of how much space is left in that partition, there is no way to know when you are close to filling it up until the device tells you it's full. No matter how many ebooks, magazines, apps, etc. you buy from B&N, your memory will still say it has 1GB remaining."
Click to expand...

It may be bad for rooters by making less of the built-in storage available, but with 32gb sd cards getting cheaper all the time it really is a non-issue, IMHO (BTW, only buy them from reputable companies as there are fake 32gb sd cards floating around).
 
+1 good info.

Not all out of date since installing a custom rom doesn't care which version of B&N rom you have if you install it internally. Only matters if you want to root it. :D

Make sure you get a SanDisk microSd card, they're faster for this type of use. Also make it class 4 or 6 if you have that option. Max size that you can use for the NC is 32 gb so nothing bigger. Some class 10 cards of other brands can be horribly slow.

CWR = ClockWorkmodRecovery. Bet you already knew that. :D
 
Thanks, guys, and please forgive my learning curve. There seem to be so many different choices to be made. :)

So, I don't think I can live without rooting. I've gotten too used to it on my phone, so I'm sure I'll try the manual root instructions. Am I right in understanding that it will blow away my stock OS? What should be my emergency plan? I liked what I read before about booting from an SD card, and then if you screw things up too badly, you just revert back to stock. Or maybe it doesn't mess with stock, but just gives me root access to stock?
 
flu13 said:
Am I right in understanding that it will blow away my stock OS? What should be my emergency plan?
Click to expand...

Nope. It will root stock and add 8 or so apps including a launcher, the market, etc, but the underlying OS is still stock. If you want to revert to out-of-the-box stock just follow the "8 failed boot" method and you'll be right back at the beginning.

...Or maybe it doesn't mess with stock, but just gives me root access to stock?
Click to expand...

Booting from an SD card rom may or may not give you access to the stock OS on the nook, but there should be no need to touch it (and I'd recommend against it).
 
Gotcha. Thanks again.

So, Colchiro, you recommended only Sandisk micro sd cards. Looking on Amazon, I can't find any by Sandisk that are class 4 or 6. How important is it to get Sandisk as opposed to, say, Kingston or Patriot?
 
Can you point me at someplace that actually sells them? I tried Google and couldn't find any class 4 or 6 from Sandisk.
 
Cool. I found a 16 GB class 4 at Walmart tonight. I'll be giving this all a shot shortly. Thanks for all the guidance, gents.
 
Well, I'm having trouble already. I downloaded the 16 gb CWR file, and tried to write it to my card, and was told there wasn't enough space. The file is 14.9 GB, and my card says it has 14.8 GB.

I then tried it with WinImager instead, and that said that the file was the wrong size, and that it could resize it, so I said ok. It then appeared to complete its operation in about 2 seconds, when I was really expecting longer. Nonetheless, I pressed forward, and copied my relevant zips to the SD card and ejected it. I powered down the Nook, inserted the card, and powered on.

Unfortunately, it didn't boot into recovery and just went into the normal Nook stuff.

Any ideas?
 
Lots of ideas, just not sure what you're trying to do. :D

Are you trying to install a rom to replace the one on your NC?
or create a bootable disk and leave your NC rom intact?

What directions (link?) are you trying to follow?

You don't need a 16gb CWR disk. You can flash it with a smaller size since you're going to wipe it later.
 
To be honest with you, I'm not 100% sure what I'm doing. :)

I am following these instructions as well as these to do the repartition.

Of course, I didn't get very far.

I think I'd be fine with installing the ROM and replacing the one on the NC, but I don't know for sure which state these instructions leave me in. They seemed like pretty concise instructions, so I thought I'd just give them a try as a first crack at all of this.
 
flu13 said:
Well, I'm having trouble already. I downloaded the 16 gb CWR file, and tried to write it to my card, and was told there wasn't enough space. The file is 14.9 GB, and my card says it has 14.8 GB.

I then tried it with WinImager instead, and that said that the file was the wrong size, and that it could resize it, so I said ok. It then appeared to complete its operation in about 2 seconds, when I was really expecting longer. Nonetheless, I pressed forward, and copied my relevant zips to the SD card and ejected it. I powered down the Nook, inserted the card, and powered on.

Unfortunately, it didn't boot into recovery and just went into the normal Nook stuff.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Try getting the CWM rom from here. Unfortunately there is no 16gb rom, but i suspect if you use a 2 gb version, it will create a 2gb partition and leave the rest of the space unused. Download the tar.gz file and use winzip to uncompress the .img file. This is the file you will flash to the SD card using winimage. If it takes only two seconds, it's not working. It should take several minutes.

If that works, then copy the manualnooter file (4.2.25 is the latest) to the root of the SD card and keep it zipped, do not unzip it.

Sorry, didn't realize you were flashing CM7. In any event, make sure you get your CWM flashed properly first.

The rest of the instructions are pretty staightforward.
 
I tried with the 2GB image, and I get the same results from both image writer apps. The one tells me there is not enough space, the other runs for 2 seconds and appears to be done.
 
flu13 said:
Grabbed the 1gb image, same results. I even tried a complete reformat of my sd card.
Click to expand...

Did you run Winimager as an administrator? And did you decompress the .tar.gz file?

Formatting shouldn't matter as winimager should blow away existing partitions.
 
Found info on a bug here that seems to be exactly what I'm running into. I'm trying to get myself to a point where I can rebuild the source with the patch added.

I also tried using flashnul to write the image from the command prompt, but I get a message saying: "DeviceControl() / IOCTL_STORAGE_QUERY_PROPERTY (adapter) failed: Incorrect function." Below, under adapter and device properties, it says Command Queue: Unsupported. I don't know if that last part matters or not.
 
Someone at XDA told me to try an external SD reader rather than my internal one, and I was able to write the 2GB image. I'm in recovery now, but I can't apply any zips, because it tells me, "E:Can't mount /sdcard" when I try to choose zip from sdcard.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom