Nexus 7 (2012 Wifi) and Kitkat 4.4

I had a scare this weekend with thinking my Nexus7 got bricked by Kitkat update from Google.

Thursday night (11/21/13), my Nexus 7 let me know that it has d/l’ed Kitkat and ready to update.  I told it to go ahead since the last few times, updates from Google went fine without any problems.

After my Nexus 7 rebooted and updated, it then rebooted again and seem to be taking a long time at the boot up screen (bouncing color balls).  It was late, past 1am, so I left it sitting there on the dresser next to bed and forgot about it.  The next night, Friday, I saw it sitting on my dresser and remember about the upgrade, so checked it and found it is STILL at the bootup screen!!! WTF!

I pressed the power button to reboot.  Same thing…. Crap!  Tried it a number of time, no luck.  I was tired, so I left it there in the bootup screen.  This evening, I had time to look at it again and the damn thing is still at that screen.  It has been a while, so I had forgot how to boot into recovery mode, sigh.   Anyway, checking online found lots of complaints from people with similar problems.

This post on AndroidCentral was the one that solved my problem.  Just thought I shared it.

The following snippet is from AndroidCentral post, I am putting here in case the post goes away.

 

” I was in the same situation and ran into that issue as well. What I did was download the 4.3 factory image from here:  https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images

Make sure you get the correct one for your device. I have a 2013 wifi so I chose: Android 4.3 (JSS15R)

Inside that downloaded file, you’ll find image-razor-jss15r.zip. It’s a couple of levels down. Unzip the files from there to your SDK folder (should be boot.img, recovery.img, system.img, userdata.img, and cache.img).

Boot your Nexus 7 to the bootloader (volume down + power) and connect to your PC with USB cable. Do NOT go into Recovery mode yet.

From the command prompt, make sure you can see your device: fastboot devices

Then, run the following commands:

fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
fastboot erase system
fastboot flash system system.img

At this point you have a clean install of 4.3 JSS15R.

Now go to Recovery mode and sideload the 4.4 OTA as you originally tried and it should work this time.

I followed these steps and was able to update to 4.4 without losing any data. YMMV”

Note: Once I was sure that I can boot 4.3 without losing my data, I actually updated to 4.4 using the above method.   The difference is that once in Recovery mode, I don’t do sideload, and I wipe dalvik cache, plus format /cache partition.

Dec 10, 2013

And now 4.4.2 update appeared on my Nexus7 and Nexus10.  Once again, I accepted the update on my Nexus7, let it boot into recovery and proceed to messed it up.  My fault this time.  I thought it would be as complicated as the previous update from 4.3 to 4.4.   I had to use fastboot procedure above to fix it.

For my Nexus10, I just had to accept the update to 4.4.2.  Boot into bootloader, flash CWM recovery, then boot into recovery and ‘adb sideload’ the new SuperSU.