Posts Tagged ‘upgrade’

As all the UK (as well as other non-US) Motorola Xoom owners are aware, their Xooms are stuck on Android 3.01 whereas the US version is already rolling onto 3.2. The European customers were promised version 3.1 a few weeks ago, but there is no news of anyone actually getting that update yet.

So … if you have a UK Xoom Wifi, here’s how you can get 3.2 installed on it. It’s not completely risk-free, and not entirely simple either, but it’s certainly less frustrating than dealing with Motorola Support when it comes to finding out information on updates.

I guess right now your About tablet screen looks like this …

… and that’s what we’re about to change!

The Process

The process you’ll follow is:

  1. Flash the U.S stock 3.0.1 image
  2. Auto-update to 3.1 (and then to 3.2)
  3. Flash the ClockworkMod Recovery image
  4. Flash the Rooted 3.2 image.

UPDATE: As a couple of comments have pointed out, the 3.2 update is now available OTA via the Auto Update. It is a two stage process, it will first update to 3.1 and reboot, after which, if you check for updates again it will find 3.2. So, follow steps 3 and 4 only if you want a rooted version of 3.2. Cheers commenters for pointing this out.

NOTE: By following these steps you’ll be voiding the warranty on your Xoom, and there is a chance you could brick your device. I’ve only tried it on the UK Wifi Xoom i.e. the MZ604. Also, this will erase all your data from the Xoom, so back things up!

These are quite detailed instructions so the process seems quite long, but it should take less than an hour to complete for most people. If you’ve done firmware updates before, it should really take around 20 minutes to fully root, or less than that to get the stock Android 3.2.
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If you have one of the older Buffalo Linkstation Pro NAS drives (pictured below) and it is running out of space, you can simply upgrade the drive. It really isn’t that difficult if you are used to upgrading bits in your computer. Might be a little daunting if you have never opened your computer though. :)

Photo of the Buffalo Linkstation LS-500GL-1 NAS

Picture of the back of the Buffalo Linkstation LS-500GL-1 NAS

I just upgraded the drive in my LS-500GL, replacing it with a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive, which didn’t take very long at all (except for copying all the data across). What’s more … it is much quieter than the old 500GB Samsung drive that was in the Linkstation, which is a bonus!

What you need to do is to

  1. Backup the data from the Linkstation,
  2. Remove the drive,
  3. Clone the first two primary partitions from your old drive to your new one,
  4. Create an extended partition, with a swap partition, and a data partition in the new drive,
  5. Place the new drive in the Linkstation.

… and that’s it!

So, lets proceed …
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