1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. Install android 3 0 honeycomb and market on nook color

Install Android 3.0 Honeycomb and Market on Nook Color

bn_nook_color1
HoneyComb is Google’s latest and finest development for the upcoming Android tablets and it can now be used on Nook Color, one of the best E-reader devices available today. The installation takes place on an External SD Card, which leaves the current default setup of your device untouched. if you want to try out HoneyComb without having to risk the integrity of your device or your warranty, read on.

With this guide,  you will be able to convert your Nook Color from an eReader into a Honeycomb tablet and enable Android Market on it to be able to install and use hundreds of thousands of apps. This method uses a virtual image for the Honeycomb ROM and installs it on the SD card of the device. Without any further ado, here is the procedure.

Requirements

  • The (https://www.rbrune.de/nookhoney02.img.zip) HoneyComb Virtual Image for Nook Color.
  • Free disk image writing tool ImageWriter (Download  and extract to your computer.)
  • A FAT32 formatted SD card with atleast 4GB free space.
  • A microSD card reader (A USB one or one that comes built-in with many computers).

Preparing the SD Card

For Windows Users:

  • Launch ImageWriter, browse to the location of the downloaded Honeycomb Virtual Image, select your SD card under ‘Device and click the ‘Write’ button.
  • Once the image has been written to the SD card, remove it from the card reader and insert it back into your Nook Color.

For Mac Users:

  • Open a terminal window
  • Find which drive the SD card is mapped to. [type in the terminal this: “diskutil list” , Be very careful to identify the SD card and not your hard disk. Be VERY careful.]
  • Now unmount that drive typing this: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk#
    The computer should say: Unmount of all volumes on disk was successful
  • Type: dd if=nookhoney02.img of=/dev/rdisk# bs=1m
  • Everything needed should copy right over to the card.

Booting Nook Color into Honeycomb

Simply power down your Nook, insert the SD card and power it back up. It will automatically boot into Honeycomb!

Installing Android Market [See the update below for a better alternative method]

Installing Android Market over your freshly installed HoneyComb will require a different approach than just installing an APK.

  1. Make sure you have ADB up and running, and your device recognized. Refer to our guides on what is ADB and how to install it, and how to enable ADB USB drivers for NVIDIA Tegra and Tegra 2 based devices.
  2. Download this version of the Market (2.2.11).
  3. Download GoogleServicesFramework.apk (no longer available; use the alternative method below instead).
  4. Place the files in any folder on your computer and open a Command Prompt window, browsing to that folder.
  5. Enter these commands in the Command Prompt window: 
    adb shell mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mmcblk1p2 /system
adb push Vending.apk system/app/Vending.apk
adb push GoogleServicesFramework.apk system/app/GoogleServicesFramework.apk
adb shell
cd system/app
chmod 6755 Vending.apk
chmod 6755 GoogleServicesFramework.apk
exit
adb reboot
  6. Now go to apps, open the market and sign in. If the Market won’t open at first, reboot and try again and it should work.

UPDATE: Installing Android Market and Google Apps (Alternative Method):

We recently came across an excellent script written by XDA-Developers forum member jleecong that takes care of installing Market, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Maps and Contact Sync for Gmail in one easy go, without having to enter any ADB commands yourself.

  1. Make sure you have ADB up and running, and your device recognized. Refer to our guides on ADB installation, and how to enable ADB USB drivers for NVIDIA Tegra and Tegra 2 based devices.
  2. (https://addictivetips.com/app/uploads/2011/02/HoneyGApps.v2.zip) Download HoneyGApps v2 and extract the contents of this zip file to a folder on your computer.
  3. Browse to the folder where you extracted these files and run the HoneyGAppInstall file.

That’s it – you should now have the above-mentioned Google Apps installed on your device. Enjoy your Honeycomb Nook ! If you want to go back to your stock configuration, simply power down your device , remove your SD card and boot up !

[via AndroidCentral]

default avatar image
Read Full Bio
Fahad Abdullah

A Robotics Engineer by profession, driven with a geek's urge to learn, to understand and to keep up with the rapidly changing technology all around us. I'm an Android enthusiast and hope to contribute what little I can to the Android world.

Latest from Author
Install Gingerbread Based CyanogenMod 7 on LG Optimus One P500 How To Root & Install ClockworkMod Recovery on LG Optimus One

57 Comments

  1. PLEASE HELP. So I used Win32 image writer. It was succesful but the very first screen says “please enter password to decrypt storage”. I dont think I setup any passwords on my micro sd card…..:/

  2. Its not booting from the SD card. All I see is a blank screen. Wont boot unless I remove the sd card

  3. All I get is the unlock, nothing else happens. Does the NC have to be rooted? I thought it did not have to be. This is not my NC so i do not want to root it

  4. I had problems with this proceedure. The device would not be found by ADB. To resolve, I uninstalled PDANet. Works! Took an hour to figure that out.

  5. I installed honeycomb and my touchscreen won’t respond. I am stuck on the “would you like to shutdown” screen for powering off, and I can’t do anything. Any advice?

  8. Can someinmake a video of them doing this please? Ive got the nook color and i am on honeycomb 3.0 right now and i am trying to get the adroid market. I didnt do anything soecial i just took my mem card from my phone and this came up, id reslly like to get the market but thos seems to complicated to not follow from someone doing it visully, please help,

  9. On my mac when I type the terminal command it says “dd: nookhoney04.img: No such file or directory” Why won’t it work 🙁

  11. I finally got ADB to work, and Android Market installed. I downloaded and installed an App from the Market successfully.

    When I go to MyMarket from my PC, it doesn’t list the Nook, just my old Android phone.  Is there something I need to do?  It’s much easier to browse and download from the PC and have the Apps pushed to Android.

  12. Great guide. Worked for the most part but I have one problem. After installing the market and other google apps using the bat file provided i open Market, sign in, and try to download an app. It says “Your item will be downloaded” but the app never downloads. If I go to My Apps in the market some apps will never show up there at all and others will show up but never download. Any ideas on this?

    • I had the same thing happen,  I redid everything from scratch and now market works again.
      Still have a problem with some apps simply not running –  no video or audio.  Astro file managers sees nothing.  I think because since everything is on the SD card, there is no SD Card for the Nook to see.

  13. Converted my nook with honeycomb but can’t download no apps. Will ask which device and all devices shown belong to my phones. Someone help me please….!!!!

  14. Hi,

    In the shell script HoneyGAppInstall.cmd,

    The first command seems very specific to some version of hardware. It could be replaced with

    adb shell mount -orw,remount /system

  15. BTW, Win32diskimager (or something) only works for PC. I haven’t tried out ADB. Go to XDAdevelopers.com if you want the lateast Honeycomb update(3.0).

  16. Sweet! Haven’t tried it out yet, but I recentley installed Honeycomb on my Nook (which I am typing on right now) and boy, Deeper Blue did a great job with user interface and style. I’ve heard this only works for PCs?

  17. http://www.rbrune.de/nookhoney02.img.zip
    It appears that this link is broken. I get a 404 error when i try to get to the Honeycomb image.

  18. … mount the honeycomb image to the card. When you partition the card and mount the image to the one partition, the OS doesn’t boot. I have a 16gb card but it seems silly that 14gb are sitting useless.

  19. Everything worked perfectly, except the image left a ton of my SD card unused and not listed as free space. Disk manager on the mac says the free space isnt allocated into the partitions and the size of the partitions cant be edited. Does anyone know how to increase the free space in the sd card image partitionwhen you

  20. Do not use the nook usb cable – it doesn’t work with this. I tried for hours and ended up using the cable from my phone and worked like a charm first time.

  21. I’ve spent hours trying and retrying this. It just doesn’t work. The drivers appear but adb just doesn’t see my device.
    Despite what http://nookdevs.com/NookColor_USB_ADB says if you delete the B&N Ebook Disk USB Device listings they just come back. The empty partitions of the SD card are visible in my computer, but the boot partition isn’t and adb doesn’t see a device.

  22. Way cool! Took me a couple times going through it before I could get ADB to recognize the Nook, but once I got through that I issue was able to get the Android Market to appear and to start adding apps. I have an iphone so I’m new to the Android interface. So far I like it alot. Some folks obviously went to a lot of effort to put this together for people like me. Thanks.

  23. Wow, for all of you complaining, go buy a Xoom. Some people out there are doing incredible things to get other Android OS’s to work on the nook and everybody just bitches when they run into an issue…

  24. tried to install flash player 10.2 adk but didnt install properly what to do?

    • That’s an interesting replay to a flash question – since ipad won’t do flash.

    • Yeah, if you go to the Color Nook Portal, it states what works and what doesn’t work in this version of HC for the NC. Flash, unfortunately, is one that does not.

  25. My NC with Honeycomb is not showing google apps. I have adb running and ran honeygappinstall, cmd came up very quickly and then disappeared. Rebooted NC but no gapps listed in apps… any help would be appreciated

  26. Thanks for this article, I was up and running after one read through and one try. Tremendous!

  27. The latest update to the Nook Colors official firmware included a flash enabled web browser. Is there any way to get flash working with Honeycomb? I can’t find it in the app market and I tried to install an apk of Flash Player 10.2 using the USB cable but was unsuccessful.

  28. The link to the HoneyComb Virtual Imange for the nook is broken. Where can I find it, or can I use any HoneyComb image for the nook.. This also looks like you are not having to root the nook tor this to work. Does the nook need to be rooted?

  29. For ADB, you have to uninstall the portable device and USB mass storage device from your device manager while the device is plugged in and then install the package from the website linked. I had a lot of trouble getting it to run but it finally worked, following these instructions:
    http://nookdevs.com/NookColor_USB_ADB

  30. According to what I have read the HC SD image is not rooted. To root, I need adb connected to the Nook Color. To use adb, the device needs to be rooted. Seems to be a vicious cirlce with nothing accomplished. Can anyone help?

  31. Tried all this, even got the drivers right, but no devices listed in the command prompt. Im dead in the water. Any suggestions? And here’s a question for anyone reading- why not make the market an inherent app in the OS?

  32. Use this for updating the drivers

    http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=882751

    Man thanks for putting all this together

  33. The above instructions only partially work on the mac. The updated link for the image is www.rbrune.de/nookhoney04.img.zip. The problem is that adb does not recognize the nook on the Mac. You can download the market app directly to nook and install it from there, but you cannot install GoogleFramework. It fails.

    So maybe I need to see if nook can be recognized at all by the mac.

    • Like Johnny Depp, I installed nookhoney04.img but my Mac doesn’t recognize the Nook while it’s running it (it does while running the rooted B&N 2.1 install) — any workarounds for this?

  34. I can’t get adb to recognize my Nook either. I’ve tried a handful of times on a couple different computers, but it won’t allow me to change the driver to get it to recognize adb. Both computers (Vista, one 32 bit, one 64 bit) basically tell me that the driver is not compatible, and to make sure it is compatible with 32/64, depending on which computer I use. I have Honeycomb on the microsd card already (that part was easy), but I need to get adb recognition so I can get Market/Gmail/Maps/etc. on there. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

    • Finally found a quick, easy way to do it as someone made an exe file to get it done. Here’s the link. Enjoy!

      http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=910008

    • Ditto, adb won’t recognize it from the PC, can’t install adbwireless since I can’t get the market to work. Just problem after problem. What a complete f’ing waste of time.

    • I got it to work, the reason it will not recognize the nook color is due to naming conventions. use that link he provided but as with this walkthrough you must edit the .ini file. for mine it would not find the driver for “NookColor” so I went in and found where he put the drivers for “Nook” and added “Color” to the end of that and it worked beautifully. Just make sure that is what the device is named in the Device Manager. If it is named differently, then edit “Nook” AND ONLY “Nook” to the device’s name as shown in the Device Manager. That method will also work for This walkthrough as well. Just make sure TO VERIFY NAMES and DON’t Mess with the Listing under “Nook” which is listed as “B & N Nook Color” or something close to that.

    • Just found this…

      I found that the lines:
      ;NVIDIA Tegra
      %SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USBVID_0955&PID_7000
      %CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USBVID_0955&PID_7100&MI_01

      were
      not correct for my Color Nook. If you right-click and select
      Properties -> Details you should see the Device Instance Id. Change
      the USBVID_#### to match what you see in the Device Instance Id (2080
      as the previous post mentioned) and the &PID_#### to what you see in
      the Device Instance Id (0002 in my case). With those changes and
      0x2080 in the adb_usb.ini file, it worked for me. Good luck!

      My Corrected Lines:

      ;NVIDIA Tegra
      %SingleAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USBVID_2080&PID_0002
      %CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USBVID_2080&PID_0002&MI_01

  38. What about installing Market with a Mac? There are no goos instructions. The ones above are for PC.

Searching for something else?

Chances are, we can find what you're looking for: