Run a full android phone rom on the Android Emulator

Question

As the title says, it is possible to run a full android device rom inside the Android emulator?

Answer 1

Yes you can, but getting it to work 100% might be hard. most of the roms include specific drivers for the hardware they are running on.

I am not 100% on this working, but here are the steps to try:

1. Create a Nandroid backup
2. Create a new AVD for your ROM
3. Copy system.img from the nandroid backup to c:/users/myusername/.android/avd/myrom.avd/
4. I think you can also take the userdata.img or the other images as well, but i would try just system.img first
5. start up your emulator and see if it boots, but again, the rom may be expecting specifi hardware that the emulator is not going to have.

Answer 2

What do you mean? The sdk ships with specific roms already. You can also download certain roms from the Motorola website (like cliq, milestone) to run with the emulator (those roms do not include the Google apis though). You can also download the cyanogen roms and run those. Here a forum post with instructions.