A lot of people are running into a "missing system.img" error when trying to flash the Android 5.0 factory image. After struggling with it for over an hour I found a solution.

All you have to do is flash the .img files manually.

When you extract the factory image you'll have a .zip file. Unzip that and you'll see all the .img files. Move the radio and bootloader .img files into the same place you just extracted the zip. Now it's just a matter of running commands.

fastboot flash bootloader <bootloader file name here>.img

fastboot flash radio <radio file name here>.img

fastboot reboot-bootloader

fastboot flash recovery recovery.img

fastboot flash boot boot.img

fastboot flash system system.img (this one will take the longest)

To perform a full wipe do this:​

fastboot flash cache cache.img

fastboot flash userdata userdata.img​

That's it. Reboot your phone

fastboot reboot​

Has anyone else ran into this error?