AndroidSparseImages

Android Sparse images

System images that are generated by android are generated in a so called sparse image format. This allows for smaller images to ship.

If you find the need to look into the images you will need to convert them back to normal (raw) images. The tool to do this is called simg2img. There are many resources on the internet that host this binary but it simply can be generated from within an android build.

Invoke

make simg2img_host

To generate a host binary called ..... simg2img (calling make simg2img will only generate a binary for the target machine e.g. arm)

The result can be found in:

out/host/linux-x86/bin/simg2img

After this thing get simple convert your image to to a raw image and loop mount it

out/host/linux-x86/bin/simg2img system.img out.img
sudo mount -o loop out.img /mnt