Practical Mobile Forensics - Third Edition

Flashing a new recovery partition

There are mechanisms available to flash the recovery partition of an Android device with a modified image. The fastboot utility would facilitate this process. The fastboot is a diagnostic protocol that comes with the SDK package, used primarily to modify the flash file system through a USB connection from a host computer. For this, you need to start the device in boot loader mode, in which only the most basic hardware initialization is performed.

Once the protocol is enabled on the device, it will accept a specific set of commands that are sent to it via the USB cable using a command line. Flashing or rewriting a partition with a binary image stored on the computer is one such command that is allowed. Once ...