Android Fastboot

Introduction
Fastboot is the name of a tool used to manipulate the flash partitions of the Android developer phone. It can also boot the phone using a kernel image or root filesystem image which reside on the host machine rather than in the phone flash. In order to use it, it is important to understand the flash partition layout for the ADP1.

The fastboot program works in conjunction with firmware on the phone to read and write the flash partitions. It needs the same USB device setup between the host and the target phone as adb.

Flash partitions
Flash partitions on the ADP1

Special boot mode


To use fastboot, you have to reboot the phone into the special 'fastboot' mode. Do this by turning off the phone, then booting the phone, holding down the camera button on the side of the phone, while pressing the power button.

You can tell you are in 'fastboot' mode when you see a screen with drawings of 3 Androids riding skateboards, on a white background.

The yellow line in the middle of the screen will say "Serial0" until you plug in the USB cable, and press the "back" key. Once you do this, after a few seconds the yellow line will switch to saying "FASTBOOT".

At this point you are ready to send commands and/or data to the phone using the fastboot program on your host.



Commands
The fastboot command line usage is: $ fastboot -h usage: fastboot [ ]

commands: update                       reflash device from update.zip flashall                                flash boot + recovery + system flash [ ]        write a file to a flash partition erase                       erase a flash partition getvar                       display a bootloader variable boot [ ]             download and boot kernel flash:raw boot [ ]   create bootimage and flash it  devices                                  list all connected devices reboot                                  reboot device normally reboot-bootloader                       reboot device into bootloader options: -w                                      erase userdata and cache -s                      specify device serial number -p                            specify product name -c                            override kernel commandline -i                          specify a custom USB vendor id

Erase an individual partition
To erase an individual partition, use: E x: fastboot erase cache
 * fastboot erase

Write to an individual partition
To write an image file to an individual partition, use:
 * fastboot flash [ ]

If writing to the 'splash1' partition, the file needs to be an image file in a special format. See Android Splash Image for details.

If writing to the 'recovery' or 'boot' partitions, the file consists of a Linux kernel and initrd file system image. This can be created with the 'mkbootimg' program.

If writing to the 'system', 'cache', or 'userdata' partitions, the file is a file system image formatted in yaffs2 format.

FIXTHIS - document how to create one of these.

To boot with a host-side kernel image (and rootfs image)
This command allows you to download a kernel image (and optional root filesystem image) and boot the phone with those, instead of using the kernel and rootfs in the boot flash partition. It is very useful while developing a kernel or modifying the rootfs.


 * fastboot boot [ ]

Ex: fastboot boot linux-2.6/arch/arm/boot/zImage root-image/recovery.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz

Resources
Good cheat sheet at: http://andblogs.net/fastboot/

You can download binaries of 'fastboot' from: http://www.htc.com/www/support/android/adp.html (see the table about the 1/4 down the page)