Chris Alexander

On Engineering

Howto: force the Froyo update to your Nexus One

24th May, 2010

I may have gotten a little impatient while waiting for my Nexus One to update to Froyo.

So I took my phone into my own hands and followed some instructions online on how to force the update onto your phone. Turns out, it’s not so painful, but the instructions are less than clear. So I combined some together, made a video, and hopefully it should be simple now!

Check out the details below.

Preparation

First of all, go and grab the download of the update. You can get this from here (update: looks like this is dead. Trying to find a replacement). This is the official Google download of the update, which is used by the phones (someone who got the auto update managed to catch where it requested over the network) when they get told they have an OTA available.

Rename the file to “update.zip” (if you’re on windows and can’t see it has .zip already, then just rename it to “update”).

Plug your Nexus One into your PC, and mount the SD card, then copy the “update.zip” into the root of your SD card. Unmount your phone, then you’re good to go.

The Instructions

Next up, you need to follow a series of instructions that I’ve added in to this video of my phone’s update. They are summarised below, and if you want more detail, check out this post.

Sources

Thanks for a bit of help from Engadget, Gadgetopolis and the XDA dev forums.