[ROOT] Hardmod Root Your Amazon Fire HD 8 (7th Gen)

[RagManX]

Getting my SD-reader this week. Will hopefully have time next weekend to give this a shot. My soldering skills are mediocre at best, but hopefully I can pull this off and get a rooted HD8. Just glad I have the right model to do it. Thanks, @<br /> for your work.

 

[Ares33x]

Curious, what is needed to perform this on the 8th Gen tablets?
Do I just need to find the eMMC connection points and perform the same procedure of copying the SU files into the system partition?
Also do you know if the system partition are unique to each tablet, assuming they are un-linked from their amazon accounts. If so I wonder if it possible to write older images to "downgrade" a tablet or create pre-rooted images.

Just some thoughts, but I will poke around for the 8th Gen hardware and find the points if they are different. I have access to oscilloscopes and logic analyzers if needed.

Thank you again for taking the time to find this stuff out, reminds me of game consoles and backing up their system images.

 

[richaardvark]

Curious, what is needed to perform this on the 8th Gen tablets?
Do I just need to find the eMMC connection points and perform the same procedure of copying the SU files into the system partition?
Also do you know if the system partition are unique to each tablet, assuming they are un-linked from their amazon accounts. If so I wonder if it possible to write older images to "downgrade" a tablet or create pre-rooted images.

Just some thoughts, but I will poke around for the 8th Gen hardware and find the points if they are different. I have access to oscilloscopes and logic analyzers if needed.

Thank you again for taking the time to find this stuff out, reminds me of game consoles and backing up their system images.

I don't believe this hardware rooting method is an option on an 8th-generation Fire tablet, unfortunately :-/. See this comment about five or so replies back:

No, don't bother with this, unless you have a plan to defeat dm-verity. Fire OS 6, which is based Android 7, implements integrity checking for every block on the system partition. So merely mounting system in read/write mode will modify it, causing the device to refuse to boot.

Unless you somehow have an 8th-generation device, not running FireOS 6...

---------- Post added at 06:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:57 PM ----------

I'm torn myself at this point as to which direction would be best for me, mainly because there have been so many updates and changes lately and I haven't been following too closely.

I have four 7th-gen Fire HD devices: three HD 8s and one HD 10.

My HD 10 is rooted. My HD 8s are not, but DO use the "pm hide" method to help keep system bloatware under control and to also prevent the device from updating. All of my devices are still running FireOS 5 and have OTA updates disabled.

The rooted HD 10 works well ✔ but oh my god I would kill to have Android 7 (not really, not into violence ✌ ? ☮)!

Three questions re: current software update options for HD 10:

1) If I update the HD 10 to run FireOS 6, is the rooting method which I used previously to gain root still an option?

2) Have they even released FireOS 6 for 7th-gen HD 10s yet? Are they even going to?
I believe when I last looked at the Amazon manual firmware download page last week or so it seemed 7-generation HD 10s did not have Fire OS 6 available for download.

3) Is there anyone out there who is using an HD 8 or 10 with the newer Fire OS 6 (Android 7-based) update who used to run the older Fire OS 5? Are the enhancements pretty substantial/definitely worth updating for, or am I better off with my rooted current device and the older version of android?



And then for my three HD 8s (not rooted, but utilizing the 'pm hide' system app disabling method):

1) Are the updates so substantial/helpful it's worth updating, even though I'll then lose the ability to hard-mod root?


Thanks to anyone out there with answers to any of my questions/to anyone who has a moment to share their guidance!

 

[richaardvark]

I don't believe this hardware rooting method is an option on an 8th-generation Fire tablet, unfortunately :-/. See this comment about five or so replies back:




Unless you somehow have an 8th-generation device, not running FireOS 6...

---------- Post added at 06:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:57 PM ----------

I'm torn myself at this point as to which direction would be best for me, mainly because there have been so many updates and changes lately and I haven't been following too closely.

I have four 7th-gen Fire HD devices: three HD 8s and one HD 10.

My HD 10 is rooted. My HD 8s are not, but DO use the "pm hide" method to help keep system bloatware under control and to also prevent the device from updating. All of my devices are still running FireOS 5 and have OTA updates disabled.

The rooted HD 10 works well ✔ but oh my god I would kill to have Android 7 (not really, not into violence ✌ ? ☮)!

Three questions re: current software update options for HD 10:

1) If I update the HD 10 to run FireOS 6, is the rooting method which I used previously to gain root still an option?

2) Have they even released FireOS 6 for 7th-gen HD 10s yet? Are they even going to?
I believe when I last looked at the Amazon manual firmware download page last week or so it seemed 7-generation HD 10s did not have Fire OS 6 available for download.

3) Is there anyone out there who is using an HD 8 or 10 with the newer Fire OS 6 (Android 7-based) update who used to run the older Fire OS 5? Are the enhancements pretty substantial/definitely worth updating for, or am I better off with my rooted current device and the older version of android?



And then for my three HD 8s (not rooted, but utilizing the 'pm hide' system app disabling method):

1) Are the updates so substantial/helpful it's worth updating, even though I'll then lose the ability to hard-mod root?


Thanks to anyone out there with answers to any of my questions/to anyone who has a moment to share their guidance!

@diplomatic, do you by chance have any insight into any of the questions I asked above? Are gen 7 tablets going to ever get the Fire OS 6 / Android 7 update? Are the enhancements in the newer OS version worth holding off on rooting for? Can I update my currently rooted gen 7 HD 10 the latest OS release and then return re-root once again?

 

[diplomatic]

@diplomatic, do you by chance have any insight into any of the questions I asked above? Are gen 7 tablets going to ever get the Fire OS 6 / Android 7 update? Are the enhancements in the newer OS version worth holding off on rooting for? Can I update my currently rooted gen 7 HD 10 the latest OS release and then return re-root once again?

Hi, richaardvark..... I have no idea if Amazon will ever update FireOS 5 tablets to FireOS 6. I'm not that concerned about it as I don't actually have any Fire tablets. Unfortunately, rooting will not mix well with FireOS 6. It's almost certain that the security hole you used to root your HD10, the one that involves a "dirty cow", will be gone in any upgrade that's released. (It may even be patched in a minor FW update.) If you're talking about this HW method, well, you quoted my previous answer to this: dm-verity. Look, if you're so concerned about rooting your devices, my advice is it's best to avoid ones that are so locked down as if they were gaming consoles. Even though the tablet market has shrunk, there are still plenty of choices for cheap unlockable tablets.

 

[Arbre4]

Thank you for this hardmod ! It's so much sexier than a simple sw mod
I have a two questions :
1) It seems that my tablet update by itself (airplane mod ON). Can an update break this mod ?
2) Can I remove bloatware thanks to root access ?

 

[<br />]

Thank you for this hardmod ! It's so much sexier than a simple sw mod
I have a two questions :
1) It seems that my tablet update by itself (airplane mod ON). Can an update break this mod ?
2) Can I remove bloatware thanks to root access ?

No problem

1. I would imagine that an update could write to the system partition and break things. When I rooted I got Titanium and froze the updater app to prevent any updates from ever happening.

2. Yes, using Titanium you can uninstall or freeze apps. I recommend only freezing them so that they are gone but can easily be "thawed" if things break.

 

[klister]

And I broke it... ?. Not sure how except maybe when I was soldering the wire onto the vss area on the motherboard it took me several tries to get the solder to stick and maybe it heated things up too much on the other side of the pcb. It wouldn’t turn on either to the fast boot mode or regular boot and shows no sign of power. I accept that it may be bricked accepted that possibility when I started but thought I’d reach out to see if anyone had any ideas.

 

[<br />]

And I broke it... [emoji22]. Not sure how except maybe when I was soldering the wire onto the vss area on the motherboard it took me several tries to get the solder to stick and maybe it heated things up too much on the other side of the pcb. It wouldn’t turn on either to the fast boot mode or regular boot and shows no sign of power. I accept that it may be bricked accepted that possibility when I started but thought I’d reach out to see if anyone had any ideas.

Try removing all sources of power (USB, battery), hold the power button for 10 seconds, then reconnect the battery. It might start up — this happened to me a few times. I wasn't too careful with my board and I'm surprised how much it has lived through. Don't give up!

If that doesn't work, make sure all the wires are unsoldered and double check that there's no solder bridging in places it shouldn't be.

 

[ColdKeyboard]

I've finally managed to get the Fire to show up with my card reader.
It too a few tries but I finally got it to show up.

However I had an issue trying to execute commands mentioned in the tutorial.
In particular `chcon ubject_r:system_file:s0 FILENAME` didn't work for me. I would get an error 'invalid file folder ubject_r:system_file:s0'
I managed to go around it by using `chcon -R --reference=somefile FILENAME`.

What was confusing and what I would really appreciate if someone could take the SuperSU archive and package it so people could just extract it
to /system folder.

Another confusing thing was that there were three different partition (1.7GB, 32GB and third one I don't recall size but looked like recovery or something), and I wasn't sure
which one I should use (1.7GB one is closes to 1.5GB mentioned but some stuff was missing from that partition but it existed on larger one). Maybe marking which files/folders
are to be created would help a newb like myself.

Would anyone be so kind to post a archive that contains folder with files and folders already copied/renamed so one can just cp
them from desktop to SD card. Creating symlink and doing chmod and extended security attributes I think I have covered.

I would really love to finally get my Fire HD rooted

 

[chitlinsoulfood]

Thanks a ton for posting this </ br>! The test points to get into the eMMC were the breakthrough I had been hoping for.

Finally got around to trying this out on my own FireHD 8 7th Gen. Here are the details and the places where I got tripped up a bit.

Hardware Mod - SD Card Adapter

Long story short, make sure you don't end up getting a short.

In the end I used small bits of heat shrink tubing on the connections inside the adapter to make sure that things didn't shift around, along with some superglue to keep the wires in place and the whole thing together. If I were doing this again, or modding for friends, I'd probably work out something more permanent, but a weird superglued monstrosity did alright.

For the device side of things I ended up using some 30AWG solid-core wire I had laying around and I cut a small notch in the casing to let the wires hang free while the device was snapped back together. A few dabs of glue kept the wires in place without any fear that a pad would rip off while I was goofing around with things.

VirtualBox, Windows 10, and raw disk reads

I've used Vbox a lot in the past but the raw disk feature was a new one for me. This took some trial and error, particularly given how flaky my hardware mod was. Here are the important bits.

First off, the SD card reader (a Transcend model that looked identical to the one linked) kept flipping between PhysicalDrive6 and PhysicalDrive10 seemingly randomly whenever the adapter was attached. To deal with it I just made a vmdk file for each and dealt with it as it came up. Finding the mapping each time was easy using the Windows CLI DISKPART utility and its handy "LIST DISK" command.

In order to add the VMDK files in the Virtualbox Virtual Media Manager and, subsequently, the SATA device in the VM settings I had to run the manager application as Administrator, which was weird, but I went with it. Without running as admin the VM logs had some access denied errors.

Symlinks and Attributes

The symlinks on the eMMC were kinda weird. To get the app_process symlink to work properly I had to use the "-h" flag (aka "--no-dereference") on setfattr to get things working properly. Without it the symlink itself lacked the attribute, causing the symlink to be effectively invisible to regular users. Which was a problem when I used adb shell to get in there and run some pm commands as user, since it led to "app_process: not found" errors. Those errors didn't happen when running under su though.

To check the status of all the attributes I used "ls -lZ" and looked for anything with a question mark instead of the proper attribute. The only problems were the app_process symlink and the install-recovery.sh symlink. Once they had the right attributes applied, everything worked great.

 

[klister]

Try removing all sources of power (USB, battery), hold the power button for 10 seconds, then reconnect the battery. It might start up — this happened to me a few times. I wasn't too careful with my board and I'm surprised how much it has lived through. Don't give up!

If that doesn't work, make sure all the wires are unsoldered and double check that there's no solder bridging in places it shouldn't be.

Ok, I tried variations of no power and holding the power button, then powered holding the power button (with variations of including the volume keys) and it still won't power on. I've ordered a replacement motherboard from eBay but will continue to work with this one until I'm certain I've exhausted all options. When I get home today I'll take a magnifier and have a look to see that there aren't any solder bridges burning me.

 

[Roqnrob]

after hardmod?

after (if I'm able to) hardmod this device, how do I go about wiping it and installing a generic/fresh Android? Could someone post a guide and which version of Android should I use?

Do I even need to wipe the tablet to remove all Amazon stuff and have the tablet running as efficient as possible?

Thanks.

 

[Arbre4]

after (if I'm able to) hardmod this device, how do I go about wiping it and installing a generic/fresh Android? Could someone post a guide and which version of Android should I use?

Do I even need to wipe the tablet to remove all Amazon stuff and have the tablet running as efficient as possible?

Thanks.

There is no alternative to fire OS !

 

[<br />]

after (if I'm able to) hardmod this device, how do I go about wiping it and installing a generic/fresh Android? Could someone post a guide and which version of Android should I use?

Do I even need to wipe the tablet to remove all Amazon stuff and have the tablet running as efficient as possible?

Thanks.

As of now there's no way to install a custom ROM like LineageOS. All you can do is remove the Amazon apps, install another launcher, and hope you don't break things. This process only allows rooting of the device, not unlocking the bootloader to install a custom recovery or anything.

 

[Arbre4]

Too bad. It seems that my SD card reader doesn't read in 1-bit mode. I did the "cover up pins 1, 2, and 9-test" and my SD card is just detected, without being readable.

edit : my laptop built-in SD card reader reads in 1-bit mode !!

 

[dfroggatt]

Root Fire HD 7 (7th Gen)

As I understand this thread, hopefully not mistakenly, this method can be followed on the Fire 7 (7th Gen) as well.

I an running a Macbook with OS X. Are there similar instructions as indicated in this article that would allow using an Apple as opposed to a PC using the Terminal program?

 

[<br />]

As I understand this thread, hopefully not mistakenly, this method can be followed on the Fire 7 (7th Gen) as well.



I an running a Macbook with OS X. Are there similar instructions as indicated in this article that would allow using an Apple as opposed to a PC using the Terminal program?

It would work on Fire 7 if we knew where the eMMC pins were.

MacOS should would just like Linux. No virtual machine needed. You can run the commands in the MacOS terminal and use the Mac's own disk utility.

 

[savvytechwinner]

Amazon Fire HD 8 (7th Gen) Hardmod Root Guide​

I have successfully rooted the Amazon Fire HD 8 (7th Gen), and I want to help you do it too! This is not an easy root, but it's as easy as it can be. The aim for this root was to get at least one working method in order to help aid the development of an easier software root in the future. Countless people from the xda-developers forums worked together to make this root method possible. This thread is where everything started. In no particular order, I want to thank for their help:

/QUOTE]

Thats crazy! Could you make a video on this?

 

[klister]

Try removing all sources of power (USB, battery), hold the power button for 10 seconds, then reconnect the battery. It might start up — this happened to me a few times. I wasn't too careful with my board and I'm surprised how much it has lived through. Don't give up!

If that doesn't work, make sure all the wires are unsoldered and double check that there's no solder bridging in places it shouldn't be.

Thank you <br /> , you nailed it! I had solder bridged the resistor immediately below TP28 with such a tiny amount of solder that I couldn't see it with the naked eye or reading glasses; a magnifying glass finally aided in seeing it. So its back up and running but I'm going to wait a little while before trying it again.

As a side note, the replacement board was noticeably slower even though Antutu identified the exact same specs. I'm glad to have the old one working again and now I have a board to practice on...