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Installing Honeycomb on a ViewSonic gTablet

viewsonic gtabletThe ViewSonic gTablet hardware was capable of so much more than the stock ROM would allow. Installing Honeycomb on a ViewSonic gTablet

Installing Honeycomb on a ViewSonic gTablet

If you want to Flash or Upgrade a gTablet, please check out Viewsonic GTablet For Dummies, this is the best place to start and links to tons of information and ROMs!

My gTablet Adventure

Originally I flashed it to Calkulin+Clemsyn 1.5ghz Froyo Combo VERSION and happily ran that for about a year. It was great and I could do a ton of great stuff, but there were issue with the Market. I was able to “sideload” apps from other devices I had, but it was a pain.

Then I decided to move up to Cyanogenmod 7 (Gingerbread). This was a bit more detailed as I had to repartition the internal SD card to 2048-0 (using ClockworkMod).  it was a step in the right direction. I felt the GUI was still a bit rough and I’ll be darned if the same Market “incompatibilities” weren’t a huge pain in my rump. I felt that I could still find something more refined.

Then a friend of mine, who also has a gTablet, turned me on to Flashback (Honeycomb). It looked fantastic. Every time I’d install it, I’d get it up and running, but as soon as I’d reboot, I’d get stuck at the Viewsonic splash, you know the one with the 3 birds. I’d be unable to get into the CWM recovery mode and unable to boot back into Flashback. Not cool.

This is based on the procedure to do a normal install that I got from
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1392761 with a minor partitioning step added to ensure that I blew away my existing partitions before recreating them.

I suspected my partitions might have had issues, which will explain why I did the 4096M partition then partitioned again to the proper 2048M size in the steps below.

  1. Shutdown and boot into ClockworkMod recovery.
  2. Go into Advanced.
  3. Choose Partition SD Card.
  4. Choose 4096M for first choice.
  5. Choose 0 for second choice.
  6. Will take a couple minutes.  All your data will be lost.
  7. Choose Partition SD Card (Yes, we are doing it again)
  8. Choose 2048M for first choice.
  9. Choose 0 for second choice.
  10. Will take a couple minutes….. just like the first time.
  11. Wipe data/Factory reset
  12. Wipe cache partition
  13. Go into Advanced
  14. Wipe Dalvik cache
  15. Backspace/Return key (back to Main menu) < Very Important Here [DO NOT REBOOT RECOVERY]
  16. Select Mounts and Storage
  17. Select Format boot
  18. Select Format cache
  19. Select Format data
  20. Select Format system
  21. Select Mount USB Storage
  22. Plug USB into PC and into gTablet
  23. Copy Flashback-10.X-signed.zip to gTablet
  24. Select Install from SDCard
  25. Choose zip from SDCard
  26. Navigate to internal storage and choose Flashback-10.X-signed.zip
  27. Accept/Choose Flashback-10.X-signed.zip
  28. Backspace/Return key (back to Main menu)
  29. Reboot system
  30. Let system run the Google account stuff and connect to wireless.
  31. Open the Market. DO NOT INSTALL ANYTHING YET
  32. Go into market a few times, you should get the upgrade to “Google Play”, go head and accept the license or user agreement.
  33. Once the Android Market is Google Play, then reboot the gTablet.
  34. If it reboots into Flashback again, let it sit a few minutes then power the gTablet off.
  35. Power it back on, if it works install a few apps, then reboot to make sure.
  36. If it comes up and works, you should be good to go.

 


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