How to recover from MD5 mismatch

If any of the following is gibberish to you, it’s better to stop reading. Not everything I post is useful to the general public ;-)

If you’re trying to restore a backup of your Android and you get the error message “MD5 mismatch”, then here’s the solution. I was searching for this and found so much bad information. I feel that the correct information needs more publicity, so here’s my contribution to this.

First, here’s the typical problem that you’d experience:

ClockworkMod Recovery v6.0.4.7
Checking MD5 sums…
MD5 mismatch!

Now, follow these steps to fix this problem:

1. You should already have the Android SDK installed on your computer (Windows, Mac, Linux – doesn’t matter).
2. Connect your phone to the computer with the USB cable.
3. In a shell or command prompt, enter “adb shell”.
4. Enter “cd /data/media/0/clockworkmod/backup”
5. Enter “ls” to see the name of your backup. “cd” into that.
6. Rename the bad md5 file with “mv nandroid.md5 nandroid.md5.bad”.
7. Create a new md5 file with “md5sum *img > nandroid.md5”.
8. Now you can reboot into recovery if you didn’t already (the above steps in the adb shell work from recovery as well) and start the restore again. It should work this time!

Come to think of it, I should perhaps write a post about how to create the backup in the first place :-)