[Q] Flashable ZIPs for stock or GPE ?

Are there not any CWM/TWRP Flashable ZIPs for stock or GPE ?

I've just spent frustrating hours trying to get stock or GPE running, on my GSM device that's been happily running CM11 for a while. This in part because I'm running Linux and there's no way to get mfastboot running I guess. Tried under Linux Wine but no luck.

Only after grabbing a windows PC and messing around a bunch have I been able to get CWM re-loaded after a partial install of GPE; The GPE recovery flashed OK but /system failed.


On other popular phones, there have always been flashable ZIPs of stock derived, and GPE derived ROMs. So I could keep custom recovery and easily switch ROMs, in order to test my apps.

If there are no such solutions for MotoG, I'll just have to stick with AOSP ROMs I guess. Is there some technical reason, or just not enough dev interest in ZIP flashable versions of stock and GPE ?

Thanks for any thoughts !

divergens said:

This would be a nice thing to have. Flashing through fastboot is straightforward, but a pain...

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It's not straightforward when it's a proprietary Mfastboot from Motorola.

And Mfastboot is only for Windows and we can't run it from Linux, even with Wine.

Since a lot of Android devs, such as myself, run Linux exclusively, this is a pain. At least the popularity of Samsung has resulted in MobileOdin, to flash firmware on phone, as well as Heimdall to flash from Linux PC.


I gave up on Motorola some time ago. I hoped the new "Google Moto" would be different. With the Moto G and Moto X it looked like the "Google Moto" was finally here. Now the sale to Lenovo... I'm not so happy with "Lenovo Moto".

And since I'm ranting, LOL, what's with the phone date being reset to 1970 (!!!!) ?? I guess they saved a penny or two in hardware with this trick...

hemanthmahesh said:

Will a simple twrp backup suffice for restoring stock?

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I'm not sure...

hemanthmahesh said:

Edit: http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2605824
This might be what you are looking for. Not for dualsim though.

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Thanks. In theory it should work.

In practice it wrote over my custom recovery, then it tried, and failed, to write the system partition. I have no idea why.

This left my MotoG in a state where I had to mess with a Windows PC again, and waste another 30 minutes of my life.

So, AOSP only for me I guess...

(Must. Resist. Temptation to flash non-AOSP. Forever. Or be doomed to waste more time.)


(I have 20 app test phones I've flashed with MANY ROMs each over 3 years. Every stinkin' phone is different, pretty much, and requires different tricks and poses different problems. Each seems to require a minimum of 20 hours of reading and messing about to unlock, root, add recovery, backup, save EFS, avoid corruption bugs, etc. Buying a new test phone is just the START of the "investment" in it. What a pain, LOL.)

scott_doyland said:

Some stock ROM downloads contain motorola fastboot for Linux.

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Really ?? Can you or anyone clue me in to which downloads have a Linux version ? Thanks !

scott_doyland said:

1970 is Unix epoch. Google for it if you want to know more. I'd thought a dev working on Linux would know that already

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Oh, I've known that since the 80's, along with obscure experience with real ASR33 110 baud TTYs with punch and reader in my basement. Then there were "television TTYs" with 24 lines and 40 columns or less, LOL.

I'm just griping that the clock isn't automatically set. AFAIK some phones went cheap and can't set it automatically, while others do. (?)

Anyway, even decades old PCs have BIOSes that start in the 80's or 90's or 00's, instead of the 70's. Just seems ridiculous to have to scroll through 3+ decades when setting time.