RT 8.0 Jailbreak and recent updates?

[bfosterjr]

Hi all. Its been a while since I've lurked around here. Long story short, I've had a lot of life changes over the past year.. and I've also had a few system crashes/rebuilds so I've lost a lot of my old RT dev work & environment. Anyway, I'm looking to back into it and spare a few cycles playing around with things again. I recently dusted off my Surface RT and noticed I haven't updated it since Feb 2013 (!!). Given that the old JB thread is now locked, can anyone confirm that the JB still works with the latest/recent updates? If not, can anyone confirm the last update for which the JB still works correctly? I did some quick searches, but couldn't find any concrete info.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers!

 

[syn3h]

It does with the new updates. Just don't install KB2973544 and KB2885699. One is an auto 8.1 update. Jailbreak doesn't work on 8.1.

 

[GoodDayToDie]

Welcome back! Good to have you. The RT hacking scene has gotten pretty sad lately.

The jailbreak does still work on 8.0 (although I got one instance where it slowed the tablet terribly for a couple minutes then bluescreened with a stop message about a critical process dying, but usually it works fine). The current primary focus is on getting it working with 8.1. Read the first few parts of the 8.1 jailbreak threads to see what the problems are (in short: CSRSS is now a protected process so we can't debug it, and PatchGuard now checks the signature enforcement flag so the tablet will bluescreen after a while if you modify it). If you want to help, get in touch with @Myriachan (if you aren't already; I think there was somebody else working on it but I forget who) and see whether you can lend a hand.

If we can get past the first problem (protected process), I have some ideas how to handle the second one (PatchGuard). I can't guarantee it'll work, though; bypassing that stuff is hard and I've never tried before.

If you want to have a test install of 8.1 alongside your 8.0 install, that's possible. However, it takes a lot of storage space; I'm not sure if it can be done on the 32GB model.

 

[bfosterjr]

GoodDayToDie,

Thanks for the summary! Glad to hear that I should be able to updated my 8.0 install and still JB.

I spent a few hours catching up on the 8.1 JB status/thread -- lots of good info in there. I might try my hand at dual booting (64GB Surface RT here) and poke around 8.1 -- I have a few ideas and I'd like to have a look at some of the binaries/changes.

I've also gotta setup my dev environment again -- but it looks like the newer WDK (for 8.1) makes life a lot easier. I'll see if I can get an updated build of ProcessHacker out soon.

Cheers!

 

[jimmielin]

On this front, is there any way to "selectively install updates" other than rushing to "Check Updates" and unchecking the ones we don't want, then immediately disable Windows Update afterwards? I'm concerned about downgrading to RT 8.0 and the auto 8.1 update automatically being installed, since RT auto-installs updates and I want to install the other updates...

 

[GoodDayToDie]

They removed the UI for auto update behavior, but the registry value is still there and still works the same way. My tablet is set to notify me when there's updates but to not install anything (I forget if I told it to download them or not). You can also just turn off the automatic update feature entirely, in which case you need to remember to check manually as it won't prompt you.

 

[domboy]

Other than the awful 8.1 auto-grade "updates" already mentioned, there was an optional update released back in June, kb2962407, that seemed to break the jailbreak for me until I uninstalled it:

http://xdaforums.com/windows-8-rt/rt-development/kb2962407-causing-jailbreak-to-hang-t2803626

It's no longer in the optional updates list so I'm not sure whatever happened to it. No one else ever mentioned anything about it that I saw, so perhaps my issue may have been a fluke, or nobody else ever bothered to install it. Jailbreak still works great on my Surface RT, and this is the only time I've seen anything that broke it (knock on wood).