Scenario: You have TWRP recovery on your rooted Moto E first generation phone. You wish to install the latest OTA 5.1 from Motorola, but TWRP and Stock recovery tells you that the build fingerprint is incompatible. The classical solution in this case, is to reflash the stock Motorola ROM, but you lose your data in such case usually. You also lose your recovery. The technique described below shows you how to upgrade your Kitkat Moto E rooted/non rooted rom to the latest Android 5.1 ROM without losing root or recovery.
First, get the latest Android 5.1 Rom for Moto E first generation: XT1022_CONDOR_RETAILDSDS_5.1_LPC23.13-34.8_cid7_CFC.xml.zip
Extract it to D:\phone\motoe [Any convenient location]
Get mfastboot2 tool from http://dl-1.va.us.xda-developers.com/2/4/2/7/6/6/7/mfastboot-v2.zip?key=W216J9Bwm1EY9OJ2D1T5rw&ts=1445798764
Reboot Moto E to bootloader.
Create a script file install.bat with the following:
mfastboot flash partition gpt.bin mfastboot flash motoboot motoboot.img mfastboot flash logo logo.bin mfastboot flash boot boot.img #mfastboot flash recovery recovery.img mfastboot flash system system.img_sparsechunk.0 mfastboot flash system system.img_sparsechunk.1 mfastboot flash system system.img_sparsechunk.2 mfastboot flash system system.img_sparsechunk.3 mfastboot flash modem NON-HLOS.bin mfastboot erase modemst1 mfastboot erase modemst2 mfastboot flash fsg fsg.mbn mfastboot erase cache #mfastboot erase userdata mfastboot reboot
If the recovery gets wiped, reinstall TWRP and SuperSU. You may also need to remove the bootloader unlocked warning screen.
Note that I’ve commented out the two lines which erase the userdata, and removes the rooted recovery.
Joel G Mathew, known in tech circles by the pseudonym Droidzone, is an opensource and programming enthusiast.
He is a full stack developer, whose favorite languages are currently Python and Vue.js. He is also fluent in Javascript, Flutter/Dart, Perl, PHP, SQL, C and bash shell scripting. He loves Linux, and can often be found tinkering with linux kernel code, and source code for GNU applications. He used to be an active developer on XDA forums, and his tinkered ROMS used to be very popular in the early 2000s.
His favorite pastime is grappling with GNU compilers, discovering newer Linux secrets, writing scripts, hacking roms, and programs (nothing illegal), reading, blogging. and testing out the latest gadgets.
When away from the tech world, Dr Joel G. Mathew is a practising ENT Surgeon, busy with surgeries and clinical practise.