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Friday, 18 March 2011 22:25

[How To] Change The Bootscreen On Your Android Phone

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One of the best things about the Android platform is the level of customization possible. With some readily available tools (all of which are free) and the proper knowledge, you can make your Android phone do almost anything you want it to and make it look however  you want. Today we will discuss the bootscreen. The bootscreen is the animation that plays during the phone’s power-on sequence. It is really easy to switch out and provided you have found one you like, we can help you change it. There are some tools that you will need to have installed before we can start. First off, except in some special cases where the /system/ direction already has write access, you will need root access. Chances are you can find out all about that by heading over to XDA-Developers and searching for your device in the forums. Once you have root access, you will need one of two things: A file explorer on the phone that supports root functions. Some of the more popular ones are Root Explorer, SU File Manager, and ES File Explorer. The Android SDK installed on your computer. To install the SDK, follow these instructions: Download and install the Android SDK. This should also install the USB drivers you’ll need. If it doesn’t install the drivers, then follow these steps. Plug your phone into your computer. Go to the settings menu. Navigate to Applications>Development>USB Debugging and check that box. Using the command prompt on your computer, navigate to the “Platform-tools” folder of the SDK. Type in “adb devices” (without the quotes) and hit the enter key. If your phone shows up (it is usually a crazy string of letters and numbers), then you’re good to go. Let’s say you have found a bootscreen that you really like and that matches your phones resolution (an important requirement). Sometimes it will be packaged as a handy flashable .ZIP file that you can simply apply in recovery mode. Most of the time, though, you’re going to download a bootanimation.zip file that will have to be installed manually. The flashable .ZIP method is very simple: Put the .ZIP file on your sdcard Boot your phone into the recovery console Select “Flash ZIP from sdcard” Find the .ZIP file Flash it Voila For each phone the location may be a little different, but the idea remains the same. We’re going to be swapping the bootanimation.zip that came on the phone with another one that we prefer to use. Below is a demonstration of replacing the boot animation on an HTC EVO 4G on a Windows computer. It’s pretty simple if you’re comfortable with ADB. Even if you’re not, though, it’s simple enough for you to pick up quickly. Step 1. Find your animation. There are a multitude of places to find them, so let’s just assume you want this one. Step 2. First rename the .ZIP file to “bootanimation.zip”. Step 3. Place this .ZIP file in the same directory as the SDK’s “ADB.exe” file. (If you have a recent version of the SDK, this will be in the “platform-tools” directory. On older versions, it will be in the “tools” directory.) Step 4. We’re now going to the command line. Step 5. Now, we’ll navigate to the directory with ADB in it that we talked about earlier. (The Android SDK folder below is named “ASDK” for the sake of brevity.) Step 6. Now we’re going to run a command to make sure your phone is being recognized by your computer. Type in “adb devices” and hope that some a string numbers and letter show up. Step 7. We’re now going to mount the system as read/write so we can mess with system files. The preferred method is the simple command “adb remount”. Alternatively, you can type in “adb shell” and (on the EVO, as well as most other HTC devices) run the command “mount – o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system” then, subsequently, “exit”. If it said “remount succeeded” you have successfully finished this step. Step 8. We’re in the home stretch now. Remember how we put the bootanimation.zip in the folder we also have ADB in? Here’s why. We are going to back up the old bootanimation.zip then install our new one. The first order order of business is getting into the shell (basically using the command line in the phone using our computer as the window to see it. Type in “adb shell”, hit enter, then type “su” and hit enter, just to make sure you’re in superuser mode. Then we’ll navigate to where the current bootscreen is on the phone. Ours is in /system/customize/resource/ so we typed in “cd /system/customize/resource” then, just to make sure we’re right, we’ll type in “ls” and verify the file is there. Now, just to be safe let’s make sure we have a backup in case we do something ridiculous and need to roll back. Type in “mv bootanimation.zip bootanimation.bak. Basically, the old one will sit there and, should we need to, we can rename it BACK to bootanimation.zip and it will be back to its old self. Issue the exit command until you’re out of ADB shell. Step 9. The final step is to issue the following command: “adb push bootanimation.zip /system/customize/resource/” Step 10. Voila – you are done! Although it may seem like a long drawn out process at first, the project is easy for beginners and very easy for advanced users. The whole procedure is a good introduction to ADB and Android modding in general. We hope this helped you out and we look forward to seeing you guys use and abuse the information for some very amazing and hilariously entertaining boot logos. If you managed to do it successfully, share your boot logo as well as any thoughts and opinions you have in the comments below! As usual, stay tuned for more guides and how-to’s by following us on Facebook, Twitter, and/or subscribing to our RSS feed. Authors:

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