Oh boy, I really screwed this one up...
I purchased a used Note 3 from eBay, hoping to be able to root it after it arrived. Much to my surprise, it arrived rooted with Safestrap, Hyperdrive ROM in Stock slot, and a different Hyperdrive ROM in Slot1. I was also impressed that KNOX had not been tripped. (It said Custom, but the KNOX flag showed 0x00)
Sweet looking phone in hand, I was thrilled! I wasn't going to have to cut my teeth on rooting the device myself prior to having an opportunity to explore a rooted Android and a custom ROM. The very first thing I did was to use Safestrap to backup both the Stock slot and Slot1. After the backups, I booted the stock slot first, to see how a factory Note 3 should look. Surprise again, the stock slot booted a Hyperdrive ROM. I was a bit nervous that I didn't have a truly stock ROM, but wasn't too worried about it because I had no plans to resell or seek repairs under warranty.
I then spent a couple of days tinkering with the device. Unfortunately, half asleep during the wee hours of the morning, I was tinkering around with SuperSU -- setting grant/deny/prompt flags for different apps. Somewhere in the midst of that, SuperSU informed me that I had lost root. I checked with RootChecker, and sure enough NO Root.
Things got worse from there, as I'm sure you can imagine. RootChecker had a button to relaunch SuperSU, so I tapped it. This time, SuperSU wanted to re-install itself. Being the ignorant noob that I am, I told SuperSU to proceed, and crossed my fingers. After a few seconds of thrashing around, SuperSU wanted to reboot, so I said okay...
Now the device attempts to go into recovery, reboots itself, attempts recovery, reboots, again, and again... boot loop... and no way to charge the battery... I believe I am around 55% to 60% charged at the moment.
So I read great things about Odin and downloaded a copy -- not yet sure exactly what I was going to do with it. I have been trying to wrap my head around this for a couple of days now, but I have several questions that I hope somebody can shed some light on.
Does the rooting take place in the boot image, or in the ROM image? I am assuming it has to be in the boot image, but then I've heard you can have rooted and unrooted ROMs in different slots.
If I use Odin to flash fresh firmware, will this firmware will have a functional recovery tool bundled with it?
Since the phone is no longer rooted, the recovery will not be able to re-flash a ROM onto the device?
If an Odin installed recovery can't re-flash a ROM due to being unrooted, am I faced with JTAG options only?
If I were to use Odin to flash this firmware: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2726558 , could I perhaps get SafeStrap back and be able to restore the backups I made? The links on that page appear to be to the same (or very similar) firmware that was running prior to this disaster. NC2, Safestrap, etc.
If I can't use Odin to flash the firmware linked in the previous paragraph, and get Safestrap to restore my backups, can I use the firmware, ROMs, and PIT file linked here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2576104 to restore the phone to factory conditions and re-root from there?
Finally, is there any way for me to avoid tripping KNOX at this point? I'm not really sure I care if it gets tripped, but if I can avoid it then I probably should. Am I likely to need KNOX container support on a private device in the near future? Is there any other reason to be spooked about losing KNOX? I really don't care much about the warranty.
Any help with this mess will be **greatly** appreciated!
I purchased a used Note 3 from eBay, hoping to be able to root it after it arrived. Much to my surprise, it arrived rooted with Safestrap, Hyperdrive ROM in Stock slot, and a different Hyperdrive ROM in Slot1. I was also impressed that KNOX had not been tripped. (It said Custom, but the KNOX flag showed 0x00)
Sweet looking phone in hand, I was thrilled! I wasn't going to have to cut my teeth on rooting the device myself prior to having an opportunity to explore a rooted Android and a custom ROM. The very first thing I did was to use Safestrap to backup both the Stock slot and Slot1. After the backups, I booted the stock slot first, to see how a factory Note 3 should look. Surprise again, the stock slot booted a Hyperdrive ROM. I was a bit nervous that I didn't have a truly stock ROM, but wasn't too worried about it because I had no plans to resell or seek repairs under warranty.
I then spent a couple of days tinkering with the device. Unfortunately, half asleep during the wee hours of the morning, I was tinkering around with SuperSU -- setting grant/deny/prompt flags for different apps. Somewhere in the midst of that, SuperSU informed me that I had lost root. I checked with RootChecker, and sure enough NO Root.
Things got worse from there, as I'm sure you can imagine. RootChecker had a button to relaunch SuperSU, so I tapped it. This time, SuperSU wanted to re-install itself. Being the ignorant noob that I am, I told SuperSU to proceed, and crossed my fingers. After a few seconds of thrashing around, SuperSU wanted to reboot, so I said okay...
Now the device attempts to go into recovery, reboots itself, attempts recovery, reboots, again, and again... boot loop... and no way to charge the battery... I believe I am around 55% to 60% charged at the moment.
So I read great things about Odin and downloaded a copy -- not yet sure exactly what I was going to do with it. I have been trying to wrap my head around this for a couple of days now, but I have several questions that I hope somebody can shed some light on.
Does the rooting take place in the boot image, or in the ROM image? I am assuming it has to be in the boot image, but then I've heard you can have rooted and unrooted ROMs in different slots.
If I use Odin to flash fresh firmware, will this firmware will have a functional recovery tool bundled with it?
Since the phone is no longer rooted, the recovery will not be able to re-flash a ROM onto the device?
If an Odin installed recovery can't re-flash a ROM due to being unrooted, am I faced with JTAG options only?
If I were to use Odin to flash this firmware: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2726558 , could I perhaps get SafeStrap back and be able to restore the backups I made? The links on that page appear to be to the same (or very similar) firmware that was running prior to this disaster. NC2, Safestrap, etc.
If I can't use Odin to flash the firmware linked in the previous paragraph, and get Safestrap to restore my backups, can I use the firmware, ROMs, and PIT file linked here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2576104 to restore the phone to factory conditions and re-root from there?
Finally, is there any way for me to avoid tripping KNOX at this point? I'm not really sure I care if it gets tripped, but if I can avoid it then I probably should. Am I likely to need KNOX container support on a private device in the near future? Is there any other reason to be spooked about losing KNOX? I really don't care much about the warranty.
Any help with this mess will be **greatly** appreciated!
