[Samsung Galaxy Player 4.0, 5.0] klin1344:
Hi everyone,

I made this guide for users of a Galaxy Player 4.0 USA or INTL who want to get backups of every partition in case they completely brick their device. This will be very useful if you have somehow screwed up your partitions beyond just /system, which is what most ROMs only include. It even backs up /efs, which contains the serial numbers unique to every player and other things that even complete restore ROMs and nandroid backups don't include. It's also good to just have a backup of your partitions stored somewhere safe, because you never know when you might need them. Also, if you're reverting from CM7 (the second release or later) you will need to use this with a PIT file because CM7 uses MTD partitions. Basically, flashing this backup will allow you to completely return to how your device was before, including all your personal data and apps. Hopefully soon we'll begin to have less "bricked my player help" threads clogging up the General (and sometimes Dev) sections. Enjoy :)

This backup does not back up bootloaders, which can increase your chances of a hard-brick and are almost never needed. Also, this is for the YP-G1 / Player 4.0 USA or INTL only, not for 5.0 users.

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for your device if anything happens blah blah blah

*Pre-requisites*

- Rooted device or ROM

- Busybox (Most rooted ROMs have this, but you can still download Busybox Installer from the Play Store and update to the latest busybox version just to make sure)

- ADB properly set up

- Some space on your internal SD card (about 1-2 GBs should be fine)

- Player set to "USB Debugging Mode" found in Settings

Alright, let's begin. First we will need to make a dump of every partition on the device. However, dumping the PIT is not needed because Adamoutler has a thread with a master list of PITs. Open a Command Prompt (or Terminal if you're using Linux), make sure your device is connected and type:

adb remount
adb shell
su

Now, to back up EFS:

dd if=/dev/block/stl3 of=/sdcard/efs.rfs bs=4096

PARAM

dd if=/dev/block/stl6 of=/sdcard/param.lfs bs=4096

KERNEL

dd if=/dev/block/bml7 of=/sdcard/zImage bs=4096

SYSTEM

dd if=/dev/block/stl9 of=/sdcard/factoryfs.rfs bs=4096

DBDATA

dd if=/dev/block/stl10 of=/sdcard/dbdata.rfs bs=4096

CACHE

dd if=/dev/block/stl11 of=/sdcard/cache.rfs bs=4096

DATA (Optional if you want your apps)

tar -czvf /sdcard/data.tar.gz /data

You can exit out of the current window and open a new one once all the processes above are completed.

Now to pull all of the backups to your computer:

adb remount
adb pull /sdcard/efs.rfs
adb pull /sdcard/param.lfs
adb pull /sdcard/zImage
adb pull /sdcard/factoryfs.rfs
adb pull /sdcard/dbdata.rfs
adb pull /sdcard/cache.rfs
adb pull /sdcard/data.tar.gz

I recommend keeping these files in a safe place on your hard drive for when you need to use them. Feel free to delete them from your player now to save space.

How to Flash

First grab the correct PIT for your device here

For Heimdall, just load the PIT, click "Re-Partition", and select the correct files for each partition. Then click flash.

For ODIN, you have to tar the files together first.

Using Cygwin or Terminal, browse to the directory where all your backup files are. Then, type in:

tar -H ustar -c efs.rfs param.lfs zImage factoryfs.rfs dbdata.rfs cache.rfs > backup_package.tar

Now load the PIT, click "Re-Partition", and under the PDA section browse to your backup_package.tar (or whatever you named it to). Click flash.

After it is done flashing, here's how to restore your apps. Open Terminal or Command Prompt to the directory of data.tar.gz on your computer:

adb remount
adb push data.tar.gz /sdcard/
adb shell su -c "tar -zxvf /sdcard/data.tar.gz"

And you're done! If all goes well you should have completely restored your device, with a perfectly safe method and no bootloaders! I hope that this will be helpful to people.