Cruft

Opening or mounting Android image files under Windows is not straightforward. However, based on this post on XDA, it is rather simple. This is based on Googles Factory Android Images. This process may not work with other images.

Here is what we are going to do. Get the stock image. Extract the .img file. Convert the .img file to Ext4. Open the converted file under Windows.

You will need:

• 7-Zip to extract the image.
• sgs2toext4 to convert the image
• DiskInternals Linux Reader to open and extract the files.
• Java SDK to run the converter.

Steps

Using 7-Zip, open your factory image file. You might have to dig around in the facotry to find what you need. You might see a file ending in .tar. Double click to open it. You will see some files ending in .img and one or more files ending in .zip. Open the .zip. You should see several files ending in .img. The one we want is system.zip. Drag that out to your desktop (or anywhere you want to put it).

Double click sgs2toext4 and it should launch and ask you to drop your image file in the window. Grab your system file and drop it it in. It will begin converting immediately.

Once it’s done, launch Linux Reader and drag system.ext4.img onto it. You will see a drive named something like “Linux Ext Volume 1.” Now just highlight the files you need, right click, and save. Browse to where you want to save the files.

Done.