Things have been looking good for the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet. Not only is it now possible to root the device, but ClockworkMod Recovery has also been ported over to the Honeycomb device. With a big thanks to jcase at the XDA-Developers forum, porting ClockworkMod Recovery should be the door of opportunity for future custom kernels and ROMs.
ClockworkMod Recovery, more commonly known as CWM, is a custom recovery for Android phones and tablets that allows users to perform several advanced recovery, restoration, installation and maintenance operations on an Android device that aren’t possible with stock recovery. Developed by Koush, the same developer who created Android ROM Manager, ClockworkMod Recovery is one of the most widely used Android recoveries available for most mainstream Android devices.
With ClockworkMod Recovery installed on an Android device, it’s possible to apply updates from the device’s SD Card, wipe all of the data on the device including the cache, as well as install ZIP update files from the SD card. It’s also possible to create Nandroid backups, allowing you to take a snapshot of your device’s entire internal memory, including partitions, and to save it to the SD card.
At the moment, the process of installing CWM on the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet is rather experimental. Some users have reported that they couldn’t get it installed at all, while others have reported that it worked just fine for them. Other users have also reported that their /sdcard access and backup options were broken for now. jcase has told users that they should consider this as a test build.
Requirements
If you’re feeling adventurous and want to give installing CWM a go, you’ll need a few things:
- A rooted Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet
- An SD card installed on your Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet
- A PC running Windows
- The ClockworkMod Recovery image file
- ADB installed on your computer. (You can get ADB by installing the Android Software Development Kit [SDK].)
- To err on the side of caution, manually back up any important files from your Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet onto your computer.
- Make sure that your Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet has a charge of at least 70%, to prevent it from shutting down during the installation process.
Instructions
Here’s how to install ClockworkMod Recovery to your rooted Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet:
- Download the ClockworkMod Recovery image file for the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet. Get it here. Save it to your computer and do not rename or modify the file.
- Copy the image file into the same folder on your computer where “adb.exe” is located.
- Open a command prompt on your computer.
- Change directory to where adb.exe and the CWM image file are located.
- Type the following commands at the command prompt one at a time (press Enter key after each command line):
- adb push cwr_ventana_2.img /data/local/
- adb shell
- su
- mount -o rw, remount /system
- echo “#!/system/bin/sh” > /system/etc/install-recovery.sh
- dd if=/data/local/cwr_ventana_2.img of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p1
- reboot recovery
If you’ve followed the instructions carefully, your device should reboot into ClockworkMod Recovery. Congratulations!
