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I have pulled boot.img from my phone's CWM backup. How do I extract it? I tried split_bootimg.pl. But throws an error -

Android Magic not found in boot.img. Giving up.
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What kind of phone is it from? – eldarerathis♦ Jul 20 '12 at 14:26
@eldarerathis Sony Xperia P – Anirudh Jul 20 '12 at 14:31
Hm, okay. I've seen cases where some devices from smaller manufacturers use non-standard headers on their boot images, but I wouldn't expect that from Sony. I'd try the unpack-bootimg.pl script from here, maybe (instructions are covered in detail on this wiki page). Perhaps that one will be able to correctly unpack it. – eldarerathis♦ Jul 20 '12 at 14:34
anirudh@Kat ~/Downloads/mkboot $ ./unpack-bootimg.pl /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img kernel written to /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-kernel.gz ramdisk written to /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz gzip: ..//home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz: No such file or directory cpio: premature end of archive extracted ramdisk contents to directory /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-ramdisk/ – Anirudh Jul 20 '12 at 14:55

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

After reading the comment, I spotted the error...

anirudh@Kat ~/Downloads/mkboot $ ./unpack-bootimg.pl /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img kernel written to /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-kernel.gz ramdisk written to /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz gzip: ..//home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz: No such file or directory cpio: premature end of archive extracted ramdisk contents to directory /home/anirudh/Downloads/boot.img-tools/source_img/boot.img-ramdisk/

For the boot.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz - this needs special handling... try this:

gzip -dc boot.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz | cpio -i

The way to do it is after unpacking the boot.img, create a directory called something like ramdisk, go into that directory and use gzip -dc ../boot.img-ramdisk.cpio.gz | cpio -i, the reason is, to organize the structure and files with minimum clutter.

gzip decompresses the ramdisk archive to stdout, pipe it into cpio with the -i switch to read from stdin and it will correctly extract the data.

To do the reverse, say after making a change here and there within the ramdisk directory:

mkbootfs ramdisk/ | gzip > my_new_ramdisk.gz
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Thank you @t0mm13b. – Anirudh Aug 1 '12 at 7:49
up vote -1 down vote

android Magic not found in boot.img. Giving up.

I got similar error, when I tried with the ROM.zip.

Then I extracted the zip file "unzip ROM.zip". Which gave the following structure. Then I extracted the boot.img.

drwxr-xr-x 3 vramaraj sw-team 4096 Oct 9 2011 data/

-rw-r--r-- 1 vramaraj sw-team 70 May 16 2012 installbusybox

drwxr-xr-x 4 vramaraj sw-team 4096 Oct 6 19:03 sdcard/

drwxr-xr-x 16 vramaraj sw-team 4096 Nov 28 22:14 system/

-rw-r--r-- 1 vramaraj sw-team 4073472 Dec 2 22:27 boot.img

-rw-r--r-- 1 vramaraj sw-team 302938 Dec 3 21:14 logo.bin

-rw-r--r-- 1 vramaraj sw-team 236601691 Jan 31 22:18 ROM.zip

-rwxr-xr-x 1 vramaraj sw-team 6773 Jan 31 22:18 split_bootimg.pl*

drwxr-xr-x 3 vramaraj sw-team 4096 Jan 31 22:19 META-INF/

-rw-r--r-- 1 vramaraj sw-team 3477896 Jan 31 22:21 boot.img-kernel

-rw-r--r-- 1 vramaraj sw-team 591679 Jan 31 22:21 boot.img-ramdisk.gz

drwxr-xr-x 2 vramaraj sw-team 4096 Jan 31 22:21 ramdisk/

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