[GUIDE] Install Magisk with proper support for OTA updates

BubuXP · Sep 1, 2018

Code:

* I'm not responsible for bricked devices, dead SD cards, thermonuclear war, or you getting fired because the alarm app failed. 
* Please do some research if you have any concerns about features included in the products you find here before flashing it! 
* YOU are choosing to make these modifications, and if you point the finger at me for messing up your device, I will laugh at you. 
* Your warranty could be void if you tamper with any part of your device / software.
* Same statement for XDA.

Here's an alternative method to install Magisk that support OTA updates (copied from the Mi A1 forum and expanded

)

You need a PC with Android platform tools (they exist also for MacOS and Linux). When using Windows, you should also install MiFlash tool to get the required drivers to recognize the device.

BOOTLOADER UNLOCK

First thing to do: unlock the bootloader (if you didn't already do this, obviously). Smartphones with Android One are much easier to unlock compared to other Xiaomi phones with MIUI (where you have to ask for authorization and wait for weeks).
CAUTION: when you unlock the bootloader, the phone will reset, erasing all your saved data. Backup your data before unlocking.

1. Go to Settings > System > About phone > and tap many times on "Build number" until you unlock "Developer options" (on Andoird 9 "About phone" is right at the top of the Settings app).

2. Go back to the previous page (i.e. Settings > System), where you can find now "Developer options". Go there and enable the "OEM unlocking" option (and it's better to never disable this).

3. Now you can shutdown your phone, then turn it on while holding the "Volume down" button pressed. Release it when you see the Fastboot screen You can also use the command "adb reboot-bootloader" if you already connected the phone to the PC.

4. Now connect the phone with your PC via USB cable, open an administrative command prompt, move to the directory where the Android platform tools are placed and unlock the bootloader with the following command:

Code:

fastboot oem unlock

The phone will reboot, erasing all the data.

Now you unlocked your phone's bootloader and can continue to the next section.

MAGISK INSTALLATION

5. Download and install on the smartphone the latest version of Magisk Manager's apk available.
You need the smartphone to be connected to the internet, because Magisk won't install and won't work properly without a connection.

6. Now you can easily download an already patched boot.img from the following list and jump straight to point 10 of this guide, or you can continue to the next point and learn to patch yourself an original boot.img
If you choose the short way, be sure that you select the patched_boot.img with the same "Build number" currently installed on your phone (see point 1 of this guide), and don't flash the file directly on the phone memory, because Magisk will not work properly (do exactly what this guide says, and you will not find problems, hopefully).
For our convenience, extract the patched_boot.img file in the same directory where Android platform tools are located.

In case you erroneously flash those patched files directly on the phone, flash back the original boot.img via fastboot and follow the guide:

7. You need the original boot.img to patch. You can find it inside the official fastboot ROM zip for daisy. Check that the downloaded ROM version is the same as the "Build number" currently installed on your phone (see point 1 of this guide). If the versions are different, update (or downgrade if possible) your phone to that version. You can also download original boot.img elsewhere (for example at the point 6 of this guide), but always pick the same "Build number" of your phone.
After you get the boot.img, copy it to the phone memory (via USB or microSD, or download directly from the phone browser, as you prefer).

8. Open the Magisk Manager app installed previously, it will ask if you want to install Magisk. Accept by tapping on "Install" > "Patch Boot Image File" and select the boot.img file that you get on the point 7 of this guide.

9. Wait until the process completes (about 1 minute), then tap on "Close". Now in the phone memory, inside the Download directory, you should have a patched_boot.img file. Copy that file to the PC, inside the same folder where the Android platform tools are located, for our convenience.

10. Reboot the phone in fastboot mode (as already explained in point 3 of this guide), open an administrative command prompt, move to the Android platform tools directory and then write the following command:

Code:

fastboot boot patched_boot.img

If everything works the phone should boot normally. Open Magisk Manager and it should ask to install Magisk, if not you must tap on the "Install" button. Then choose "Install" > "Direct Install (Recommended)" to install Magisk on the phone, and reboot when finished.

11. Last step to stay safe when a new OTA update arrives: go to "Settings" > "System" > "Developer options" > and disable "Automatic system updates". From now on, you should check manually if a new OTA update is available.

Now the installation is finished, you can use Magisk Manager to install modules and manage root permissions.

HOW TO APPLY OTA UPDATES

UPDATE 9 February 2019 It seems that with the latest Magisk (v18.1) and Magisk Manager (v7.0.0) the following procedure is working fine again. I didn't test it personally, but some users gave positive feedback.

WARNING! January 2019 Since the arrival of Android 9 Pie, the OTA update with Magisk as described in the following section, doesn't seem to work anymore. It could work, but you could also get a bootloop with the risk of losing your data.
Before upgrading from Android 8 to 9, or doing an OTA update after Android 9 you should:
- backup your data;
- remove any lockscreen password or fingerprint;
- uninstall totally Magisk and reboot.
If after doing this you get a bootloop, you could try to manually flash the vanilla boot.img via fastboot on the current slot (the same version as the last installed OTA). If you managed to fix the bootloop you can then install Magisk anew, from step 5 of this guide.
If the phone wants your PIN or password to proceed after the OTA update or after fixing the bootloop, and your PINs or passwords doesn't work, then you could have to reset the phone (or erasing the data partition, that should be the same thing), losing all your data.
Last chance if everything fails, you can flash the latest fastboot ROM from the official Xiaomi site and the phone will be working again.

IMPORTANT: OTA updates will work only if all the partitions on the smartphone are untouched. Magisk Manager can restore the original boot.img following this section of the guide, but if you tampered directly with the system partition (e.g. manually editing build.prop) or other partitions, OTA will refuse to install.
You can try to fix OTA updates without the need to flash the whole original fastboot ROM, by flashing only the tampered partitions (usually only "system") with the corresponding img file found inside the fastboot ROM zip. Check the "Troubleshooting" section of this guide for details.

12. When you know that a new OTA update is available and you want to install it, open Magisk Manager, and tap on "Uninstall" > "Restore Images" but very important: absolutely don't reboot the phone now!
Important note: Magisk Manager will restore the boot.img that was found on the phone while installing Magisk. If the boot.img was already non-vanilla (for example you flashed the boot.img with TWRP before installing Magisk), Magisk Manager will backup that modified version of boot.img, and when restored the OTA will not work, as that's not a vanilla boot.img.

13. Close Magisk Manager and go to "Settings" > "System" > "System update" and install the OTA update. After the update is downloaded, a two-stages update will begin.

14. When both stages of the update process completed, it will ask to restart: DON'T DO IT!. Open Magisk Manager again and tap on "Install" > "Install" > "Install to Inactive Slot (After OTA)" and after that you can tap on "Reboot".

After the reboot you will have the updated Android version with Magisk already working.

Thanks to user @jashancheema for the Mi A1 guide and a bigger thanks to @topjohnwu for the OTA part and above all for developing Magisk.

BubuXP · Sep 1, 2018

TROUBLESHOOTING

WARNING: before attempting any of the following operations, you must disable any screen lock, PIN or password, because you risk to not get back your data (encryption issues). It is recommended to take a backup, too (as every time a custom modding is involved).

You can get errors when installing OTA updates if you didn't follow meticulously the guide.
Check this list to try to find where the problem lies:

- when a new version is found, the updater will check if all the partitions on the device are untouched. If there is a partition that has been modified, the OTA updater will not proceed with the installation;

- typically, the two partitions commonly modified by user modding are the boot partition (that's where Magisk and TWRP are installed) and the system partition (when you change a config file, add or remove a system app, etc.);

- a system partition modified only by using Magisk modules is effectively untouched, because Magisk register all changes to /system in a file in the /data partition and then trick Android to believe those changes are really applied to /system;

- boot partition instead is really modified, but if you install Magisk following this guide, Magisk will save a copy of the untouched boot partition, and restoring it before applying OTA update will make the update work.

Now, if you didn't follow this guide to install Magisk and you installed it in other ways, Magisk could alert you that he cannot restore the original boot.img (the boot partition) when you try to apply the OTA update.
To fix this, you can flash directly the vanilla (original, unmodified, untouched) boot.img taken from the point 6 of this guide, using those commands:

Code:

fastboot getvar current-slot
fastboot flash boot_? boot.img

the first command will tell you what is the current slot in use (a or b), the second command will flash the original boot into the phone, but you have to change the "?" in the command with a or b (i.e. the current slot that the first command provided).
Remember that the boot.img file version must correspond to the Android build version currently running in your phone.

If the OTA update will still refuse to apply, probably you changed something directly in the /system partition (for example you changed something in the build.prop without using a Magisk module to do this).
In this case you have to flash the original system.img in the phone with those commands:

Code:

fastboot getvar current-slot
fastboot flash system_? system.img

and as before, the first command will tell you the right slot to use instead of the "?" in the second command.
Here you can find the system.img extracted from the OTA updates zip (along with every other .img file inside that):

If you want to obtain the system.img by yourself, you can find it inside the fastboot images but usually they are not updated monthly like OTA updates. But you can extract the system.img directly from the OTA update zips found in this thread (as I did above with my dumps), using the Python scripts found here.

To make the Python scripts work in Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives, you have to download both "extract_android_ota_payload.py" and "update_metadata_pb2.py", give them execution property and then install the package "python-protobuf". After this you can give this command to unpack the payload.bin file (that you must extract from the OTA update zip):

Code:

./extract_android_ota_payload.py /path/to/payload.bin

This will extract in the current directory all the .img files inside payload.bin, including the system.img
I don't know how to proceed in Windows, probably you only need to install the latest Python2 release and the script will work.

As the last resort, you can flash directly with MiFlash the latest fastboot image available (even if older than your current version). Use the "flash_all.bat" script but before take a backup of your data, because the phone will be fully reset.
If you don't want to take the risk of not doing a backup, use the script "flash_all_except_storage.bat" when flashing, so you will keep all your data, but be warned that sometimes you will not be able to access the data anymore, because of encryption problems.
Right after the flash, you can start following the guide from point 5 or 6.
It should not be a problem downgrading the build version via fastboot, as long as the Android main version remain the same (Oreo 8.1 at the moment).

ConradB · Sep 2, 2018

Thx, nice work :good:

hasanzahir · Sep 2, 2018

Thanks to the OP. Great post! Totally noob friendly guide. Nice work.

Lione2 · Sep 2, 2018

It should also work on mi a2, thanks!

BubuXP · Sep 3, 2018

Lione2 said:
It should also work on mi a2, thanks!

Sure, but you can't use the posted patched_boot.img, because they're designed for Mi A2 Lite (daisy) and not for Mi A2 (jasmine).

EDIT: I posted the patched and original boot files for Mi A2 jasmine in the second post. I don't know if I can make a thread in the Mi A2 forum section with an adapted copy of my guide, there are already two guides there (even if not polished like this) and I don't want to create more confusion with a third guide about the same argument...

krzygaj · Sep 3, 2018

i've installed magisk from previous guide - what steps should I take to apply OTA update? - 12 to 14?
Now magisk informs me that there is 17.1 version - how to update it?

BubuXP · Sep 3, 2018

krzygaj said:
i've installed magisk from previous guide - what steps should I take to apply OTA update? - 12 to 14?
Now magisk informs me that there is 17.1 version - how to update it?

If you flashed directly the patched_boot.img via fastboot in both slots A and B as the other guide said previously, you must flash the original boot.img to both slots, then start the guide from point 10.

krzygaj · Sep 3, 2018

BubuXP said:
If you flashed directly the patched_boot.img via fastboot in both slots A and B as the other guide said previously, you must flash the original boot.img to both slots, then start the guide from point 10.

I did as you wrote but still can't install August update - is there any log?
- extracted boot.img from rom: http://en.miui.com/download-354.html
- did fastboot flash boot_a boot.img and fastboot flash boot_b boot.img and rebooted
- next rebooted and did fastboot boot patched_boot.img with patched_boot 9.6.4.0 (July update) - patched with Magisk 17.1
later did steps in guide - but when i do system update it stops on first stage

Any ideas?

BubuXP · Sep 3, 2018

krzygaj said:
I did as you wrote but still can't install August update - is there any log?
- extracted boot.img from rom: http://en.miui.com/download-354.html
- did fastboot flash boot_a boot.img and fastboot flash boot_b boot.img and rebooted
- next rebooted and did fastboot boot patched_boot.img with patched_boot 9.6.4.0 (July update) - patched with Magisk 17.1
later did steps in guide - but when i do system update it stops on first stage

Any ideas?

You tampered the system partition? Try flashing also the system.img in that case.
Another case could be that you made an OTA update from the June build to July: in this case the partitions on the other slot (probably only the boot partition) where lost when overwrited with fastboot (and cannot be restored, as we don't have any June build ROM or OTA).

If everything fails, do a full fastboot flash with MiFlash tool, but using the flash_all_except_storage.bat script, that should keep your data intact, restore all partitions (A and B) to stock versions and you can then apply OTA (before or after installing Magisk, but I suggest after installing Magisk so you can test if the guide works fine).

krzygaj · Sep 3, 2018

BubuXP said:
If everything fails, do a full fastboot flash with MiFlash tool, but using the flash_all_except_storage.bat script, that should keep your data intact, restore all partitions (A and B) to stock versions and you can then apply OTA (before or after installing Magisk).

Thanks above worked :good:
Hope the next update will go smoothly

jashancheema · Sep 4, 2018

T4Ump · Sep 6, 2018

September?

PC295 · Sep 6, 2018

When booting comes a warning message because of the unlocked boot loader. How can I disable this message?

ConradB · Sep 7, 2018

PC295 said:
When booting comes a warning message because of the unlocked boot loader. How can I disable this message?

you can't turn that off with open bootloader

proton242 · Sep 9, 2018

Guys, after i have unlocked bootloader i cannot charge my phone when is off because he go on when I insert the plug, it's normal?

ConradB · Sep 9, 2018

proton242 said:
Guys, after i have unlocked bootloader i cannot charge my phone when is off because he go on when I insert the plug, it's normal?

No

proton242 · Sep 9, 2018

ConradB said:
No

ConradB you have some suggestion? Thank you

BubuXP · Sep 9, 2018

proton242 said:
ConradB you have some suggestion? Thank you

Same problem on mine, I don't know if it's a ROM bug or it's caused by unlocked bootloader or Magisk.
The only solution at the moment is charging while the phone is switched on.

proton242 · Sep 9, 2018

BubuXP said:
Same problem on mine, I don't know if it's a ROM bug or it's caused by unlocked bootloader or Magisk.
The only solution at the moment is charging while the phone is switched on.

Ciao BubuXP, provando a rimuovere Magisk (lasciando il bootloader sbloccato) tutto torna alla normalità, cosa dici, crea casino quando patcha il boot.img?

[GUIDE] Install Magisk with proper support for OTA updates

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