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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.
Anirudh
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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
  • Related question: How to unpack and edit boot.img for ROM porting? – WhiteWinterWolf Aug 11 '16 at 15:38

1 Answers1

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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
t0mm13b
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