[BLU R1 HD Guides, News, & Discussion] :
Update March 8 2017: As you can probably tell, this is very old. I have not worked on the device in several months and I have no idea if these methods are still safe. Please proceed with caution. I will be using one of these on a daily basis in the near future, so I probably will get back into development, and hope to release new content for the phone to help out the community. Please accept this as an official warning that the following is probably out of date and that you should be very careful should you decide to try it. The original post in it's entirety is spoilered below. You have been warned.

Update: A new update was released for the Prime model, V6.6, which replaces the preloader and completely breaks SPFT. If you unlocked your bootloader (so you can use fastboot) in any capacity before taking that update, there may be hope for you yet, but as of right now V6.6 is unsupported. Update: If you used this method to safely* take* the V6.6* update*, this will still work.

Update: I just checked the stats, and this has been downloaded more than 3 thousand times. I never thought my humble little conversion guide would help out so many people. I have also added a new mirror at [REDACTED], so anyone in North America who was having trouble with the Europe mirror, give that one a shot. It should be faster! I have updated all links in the guide to use the new North America mirror, and added a separate Europe mirror link after each link.

Hello! This is a tutorial for converting the Amazon Prime Edition BLU R1 HD to the OEM BLU version. This will overwrite the relevant partitions on your Amazon version of the device with the non-Amazon version. The physical model number on your device will still be a tell (obviously), but besides that, there will be no way to tell your device apart from the regular model! You can also use this method to convert non-Prime to Prime version, and undo OTAs or system modifications. This will restore a 100% out of the box image from either edition on your device.

This will work if you have software version...

V12

V6.1

V6.4

V6.5

SAFE V6.6 FROM THIS THREAD

This will NOT work on software version...

V6.6

The V6.6 update brought a new preloader that breaks our ability to use SPFT. I am currently working on ways to reverse the damage, but as of right now, there is no way to convert (or downgrade) from software V6.6

You can use this on any 16/2 R1 HD with supported software version to...

Convert to the non-Prime OEM version

Convert to the Prime version

Remove ads (via conversion to non-Prime version)

Unroot

Downgrade to V6.1

Downgrade to V12

Undo system alterations/tampers

Restore the system image to the way it was when you first opened the box

Unbrick a device (if bricked because of bad system/recovery/boot image)

There are a handful of reports about this working flawlessly on the 8/1 model as well. I have not personally tested this, so there is still some risk factor.

This only overwrites the system, recovery, and boot partitions. Any other partitions that have been altered will not be restored. In most cases, other partitions should not have been altered, so this is not a concern. I have a full system backup of all partitions, but there is currently evidence to suggest that it is not safe to flash all of the partitions, so I will not release that backup until more is known.

You *should* be able to safely pull this off without wiping your data. This does not require your phone to be rooted or have any other modifications. You can pull it straight out of the box and do this process! If your phone is rooted, you'll lose it. This will make your phone EXACTLY like the non-Prime version comes out of the box! You can also convert a non-Prime device (or a converted Prime device back) to a Prime device using the same method, but I'm not exactly sure why you would want to. I did this all on Linux, but the Windows should work fine too as long as you have drivers dealt with. If you don't have drivers dealt with, I'm not your guy. I'll just tell you to use a better operating system. You'll also need an archive program that can deal with tar.gz files, because that's how my computer zipped them.

And the standard disclaimer: If this bricks your phone or makes it become sentient and plot with other sentient phones to murder your entire family, it's not my fault. That's all on you, buddy.

Ok, without further ado, on to the tutorial!

First, you need these things. Some of the files are quire large, so it might take a while to download:

You'll need the latest version of Smart Phone Flash Tools, or SPFT for short. You can download that from this site, or from [REDACTED]. Please use the latest version for your OS.

You'll need to download the system image. If you're converting to the non-Prime version, [REDACTED]. If you're converting to the Prime version, [REDACTED]

You need the scatter file. This will tell SPFT where the partitions are. This is the same for both variants, so just download [REDACTED]

Once you have those things, you can start actually flashing your phone:

Power your phone completely OFF! This will not work if your phone is powered on. SPFT writes directly to the phone's memory, bypassing all security measures the phone has, so it requires the phone to be completely OFF to get safe and exclusive access to the memory. DO NOT PLUG IN YOUR PHONE YET!

Extract SPFT into a folder on your computer. If you can't figure out how to do that, please stop tinkering with your phone. It's only a matter of time until you break something.

Extract the system image into the same folder you put SPFT in. The three files (boot.img, recovery.img, system.img) should be in the same folder as all the other SPFT files, including the binaries.

Run SPFT. On Windows, simply double clicking the SPFT executable should do the trick. On Linux, you must run the flash_tool.sh script as root. Open a terminal emulator, cd to the SPFT folder, and run `sudo ./flash_tool.sh`. If you recieve an error about permissions, run `chmod +x flash_tool.sh` and try the first command again.

Go to the Download tab in SPFT and click the Scatter-loading button on the far right side. DO NOT click the Download Agent button. When the file picker dialog pops up, find and open the r1hd-spft-scatter.txt file you downloaded earlier.

You should see a list of partitions. Only three of them (boot, recovery, system) should be checked, and the location should point to the files you extracted from the tar.gz file earlier. If this is not the case, double-click the location block of the boot, recovery, and system partitions, and select the boot.img, recovery.img, and system.img files from your filesystem respectively. After selecting the files, the boxes should check themselves.

From the dropdown in the upper left of the partition list, make sure Download Only is selected. Any other option could damage your device.

Click the Download button in the upper left.

While your phone is OFF, plug it into your computer with a data safe USB cable. The cable that came in the box from the factory is ideal, but any good quality cable will work just fine.

SPFT should start overwriting your phone. If you receive an error from SPFT, unplug your phone, close SPFT, and repeat steps 4 through 9. The whole process takes about 10 minutes, after which you should see a window with a large green checkmark. Once you see that window, you can safely unplug your phone and start it up. You're all done!

And as a bonus, I've also included a guide for unlocking the bootloader, getting custom recovery, and rooting the device after you've done this in post #2. That makes this your one stop shop for getting a brand new Prime phone out of the box!! :)

HUGE THANKS TO [MENTION=5312578]mrmazak[/MENTION] FOR THEORIZING THIS METHOD AND GETTING ME THE NON-PRIME SYSTEM IMAGE TO USE!

As always, if you have any questions, just ask in a thread reply or send me a private message on XDA. And by the way, hit the Thanks button in the lower right corner of the post if my guide helps you. It motivates me to keep this up to date and write more helpful guides. If you feel like giving me even more motivation and help fund future development, [REDACTED].