If you read my first post in this series then welcome back, you’re just in time because we’re about to flash our first ROM on the Advent Vega. 
This post has been updated, very slightly. Don’t worry, you probably won’t notice the difference. However, if during this process you have any real trouble. Don’t fret too much, just move on over to part 3 and we’ll give it another go. I’m hoping that this post will give you a better understanding of the processes involved in upgrading your Advent Vega so there’s benefit in working through this.
At this point you should have a folder on your computer somewhere with a few downloads in it as explained in Part 1. You need to unzip the USB Drivers that we grabbed into a folder called something like AdventVegaUSBDriver. This will make them easy to find in 6 months when you need them again.
Flashing Advent Vega Factory ROM – 1.10
I want us to do this first, for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t know what you’ve been up to with your Advent Vega, you may have already flashed CM7 or r8 or some other ROM to your lovely Android tablet – maybe your tablet doesn’t even load Android properly at the moment. Secondly I want you to know how to do this first because this is the recovery procedure that you’ll need to follow should you need to revert back to the default install. Don’t worry, it’s easy and won’t take long.
Ok, firstly you need to back up any files you want to keep on your Advent Vega. I’m not going to cover how to do this in this post but you only need to worry about any Music, Photos and other things like that. You will lose any settings you have on the device by continuing with this guide.
Make sure your tablet is not connected to your PC, and make sure it’s turned off. You can do this by unplugging it from the charger and holding down the Home hard button* on the top of the device for 20 seconds.
*There are 2 kinds of button on touch screen devices these days, Hard buttons are real buttons that you can press, soft buttons are graphics you can tap on the screen of the device, like desktop shortcuts and things.
We are going to start the device in a special recovery mode, to do this we are going to use two of the Advent Vega hard buttons, Back and Home. With the tablet held in landscape mode with the camera at the top the back and home buttons will be on the top of the device at the far right. Back is furthest to the right and Home is to the left of the screen orientation lock switch. To get into the recovery mode we need to do the following;
- Hold down the Back button for 2 seconds
- While still holding down the Back button, also press and hold the Home button for 2 more seconds
- Release the Home button but make sure you don’t release the Back button
- After a further 2 seconds, also release the Back button
If all goes well then your Advent Vega should look like it hasn’t done anything. The screen will not come on and you will not load up Android. If not then you should hold down the Home button for 10 seconds or so until the device turns off again and retry. It takes a while to get used to the timing of the button presses but once you have it you’ll be ok every time.
Now we need to connect the power cable again and plug our Android Tablet into our PC. Once we do this our computer is going to ask for drivers for the USB device. You need to select ‘Have Disk…’ when asked for the drivers and browse to the Advent Vega USB drivers that we downloaded and upzipped earlier.
Choose the driver that’s called ‘Boot Mode Recovery Driver’ (or something like that) – you will see a few to choose from.
After this has installed we can go ahead and run the softwareImage_v1.10_Vega_Final.exe file that we downloaded from the Advent Vega website (www.myadventvega.co.uk) – This will open and guide you through flashing your Advent Vega to the stock rom. This takes a couple of minutes and after completion you should be able to turn on your Advent Vega and the standard Advent loading screen will appear before you are taken to the stock Android environment.
Now you know how to reflash your Advent Vega back to the stock image using the manufacturer drivers and files. If new images are released by the manufacturer they will almost certainly follow this procedure although you will not need to install the Windows driver each time.
By the way, the whole Back button, Home button thing is hard wired into the Advent Vega which makes the device almost impossible to break.
Don’t worry if this hasn’t all gone to plan. The Windows Drivers are a bit tricky as there’s a few of them for each of the modes your Advent Vega could be in (Normal, Debug, Recovery)
In Part 3 we will move on to installing Honeycomb on the Advent Vega and using AUDI, a great new Windows application written by a member of the modaco community. It’s even easier than this part. See you there!
