[Tutorial] Wanna Backup Before U Get Root?! Heres How U Can

[toastcfh]

ok first off this is a little more technical then the other root methods. all u really need from the root update is actually the spl (hboot.img) from that point u can fast boot and are pretty much in God Mode. so yeah i wanted to root my wifes Eris. but alo wanted to make a nandroid of her stock build with all her apps and stuff. just encase she didnt like the 2.1 build. anyhow heres how i did it.



before i start fastboot will be needed for this method. u can find it attached to this post. now fastboot is a very handy thing for a dev or anyone who may wanna flash boot.img, kernels, recoveries and really anything flashable. even update.zips. anyhow put it in ur working dirrectory rename it fastboot and excute as directed. this is a linux compiled fastboot so it will ost likely only be useful to those who are running linux.

i had to rename it "fastboot.zip" to upload to xda. download and rename "fastboot" and it will work fine

also look at the attached pictures on this post. they show what stock and GOD MODE hboot menus look like. that way u can confirm u have GOD MODE before pulling the battery. u will but just to remove all doubt i posted pics so one can confirm they are in fact in GOD MODE before they pull the battery. the top line in hboot menu is all that really says ur in GOD MODE. acutually it says... "PB00100 XC ENG S-OFF"

SO LETS ROCK AND ROLL

step one: get the PBOOIMG.zip from here (md5: 63eacc5ede3b179f95dc22d8ef585f94)

step two: put it on the root of ur sdcard and turn off the phone

step three: hold volume down while powering on. let it fine the PBOOIMG.zip and read it. at this point it will ask u to push the the jogball in to continue. BUT WAIT STOP RIGHT THERE. with that screen up pull the cover off the back of ur phone.

step four: ok now that were set with the cover off the back of our phone. get ready because this will go pretty quick. push in on the jog ball to continue with the install. the phone will reboot and when it comes back it will start looking for and reading the PBOOIMG.zip (we need to stop this or else itll flash the whole build) at this point pull the battery out. the hboot.img(spl) installed in that split second before it rebooted. which means u have GOD MODE.

step five: power the phone back on normaly. once ur booted in u need to remove the PBOOIMG.zip from the sdcard. i did it like this.
adb shell rm /sdcard/PBOOIMG.zip

step six: power the phone back of then hold volume down and power back on into hboot menu

step seven: get the recovery.img from here put in a directory u can remember on ur computer.

step eight: at this point with ur phone plugged into ur computer and in hboot menu. u will notice at the top it says..."PB00100 XC ENG S-OFF" <~~this is GOD MODE. anyhow look further down and u will see the fastboot option in orange. press send key to enable. wait a second or two and u will see "fastboot usb" in red. this means ur all setup to fastboot.

step nine: now were gonna fastboot flash the recovery.img to the recovery partition. u can do this buy this command: (btw i use linux and this is where it was on my computer)
fastboot flash recovery ~/Downloads/recovery-RA-eris-v1.6.2.img

if all goes well it should print this:
sending 'recovery' (3834 KB)... OKAY
writing 'recovery'... OKAY

step ten: press volume down to return to hboot mode. then volume up to reboot to recovery.

step eleven: then navigate through recovery to backup/restore>Nand backup or BART backup (ur choice) then select and wait for the backup to finish. once its finished u can just press volume down till u get back to the main screen and then just reboot.

were finished. now ur stock rom is not a root rom. so once u reboot back into it ur not gonna have su and #. u will still need to flash a custom update.zip via recovery to have a root build. but at this point u have a nandroid backup of all the stuff had. so if for some reason u ever wanna flash back stock ur set.

the spl (hboot.img) is all u actually need from the PBOOIMG.zip to be able to have root and flash custom roms. the radio.img from the PBOOIMG.zip can also be extracted from the zip and flashed via recovery or fastboot.

 

[toastcfh]

reserved::

 

[bftb0]

toastcfh,

Awesome, makes perfect sense! I think this might be exactly what I was waiting for in order to loosen my grip on 1.5 and do the root dance.

I have a couple of questions though, I hope you don't mind:

My impression is that Amon_RA's recovery + Nandoid, BART, et cetera - (or fastboot+ S-OFF) allows you to backup/restore anything on a partition-by-partition basis, e.g. on the Eris we have

$ cat /proc/mtd :

dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 000a0000 00020000 "misc"         (normally skipped)
mtd1: 00500000 00020000 "recovery"    (normally skipped so it won't get nuked accidentally)
mtd2: 00280000 00020000 "boot"    
mtd3: 0aa00000 00020000 "system"
mtd4: 08200000 00020000 "cache"        (normally skipped)
mtd5: 09f80000 00020000 "userdata"

...but I'll have to admit - my understanding about the flashing of hboot, radio, and nv images is little bit fuzzy about what is possible - specifically if it can be done without a signed zip (the way it normally happens is with the RUU update process).

They are neither backed up nor restored by by the recovery tools, correct? (Amon_RA doesn't mention them in his announcement thread)

I was under the impression that fastboot can't flash any of those images, well... one by one anyway. Is that what the "fastboot update update.zip" method is for, or is there some other way to avoid the zip-signature issue that the RUU/PB00IMG.ZIP+hboot methods use?

I'm probably missing something completely obvious - and of, course, I'm aware that we have the 1.5 image files (hboot, radio, & nv) from the RUUs - but how do you burn them to the phone, assuming the S-OFF bootloader and/or (Amon_RA) recovery are in place on the phone?


bftb0

 

[bftb0]

Also...

- can steps 5 & 6 be skipped by ejecting the SD card after the battery pull (step 4), and re-inserting it just before step 10? (Delete the PB00IMG.ZIP file later - after everything else is done.)


bftb0

 

[toastcfh]

Also...

- can steps 5 & 6 be skipped by ejecting the SD card after the battery pull (step 4), and re-inserting it just before step 10? (Delete the PB00IMG.ZIP file later - after everything else is done.)


bftb0

well im sure it might work. but... if u eject the sdcard it will stil sit and search for the it and u will have to sit and wait for a bit. i say pull the battery because its prolly the quickest way to pull this off and its how i did it. if u wanna try to eject the sdcard instead of pulling the battery ur welcome to try. if u do it and it works well post and give feed back on what happened. i tried to make this as detailed as possible to clear up most questions. so a good post on what u did and how it went down would be great for me to update the my post. thanx

 

[toastcfh]

toastcfh,

Awesome, makes perfect sense! I think this might be exactly what I was waiting for in order to loosen my grip on 1.5 and do the root dance.

I have a couple of questions though, I hope you don't mind:

My impression is that Amon_RA's recovery + Nandoid, BART, et cetera - (or fastboot+ S-OFF) allows you to backup/restore anything on a partition-by-partition basis, e.g. on the Eris we have

$ cat /proc/mtd :

dev:    size   erasesize  name
mtd0: 000a0000 00020000 "misc"         (normally skipped)
mtd1: 00500000 00020000 "recovery"    (normally skipped so it won't get nuked accidentally)
mtd2: 00280000 00020000 "boot"    
mtd3: 0aa00000 00020000 "system"
mtd4: 08200000 00020000 "cache"        (normally skipped)
mtd5: 09f80000 00020000 "userdata"

...but I'll have to admit - my understanding about the flashing of hboot, radio, and nv images is little bit fuzzy about what is possible - specifically if it can be done without a signed zip (the way it normally happens is with the RUU update process).

They are neither backed up nor restored by by the recovery tools, correct? (Amon_RA doesn't mention them in his announcement thread)

I was under the impression that fastboot can't flash any of those images, well... one by one anyway. Is that what the "fastboot update update.zip" method is for, or is there some other way to avoid the zip-signature issue that the RUU/PB00IMG.ZIP+hboot methods use?

I'm probably missing something completely obvious - and of, course, I'm aware that we have the 1.5 image files (hboot, radio, & nv) from the RUUs - but how do you burn them to the phone, assuming the S-OFF bootloader and/or (Amon_RA) recovery are in place on the phone?


bftb0

ok im gonna give this a shot for u. ok u got the partions listed here correctly which is good. ok when u flash amon_RA's recovery it flashes to the recovery partition. at that point u got the ability to use flash_image which is in the recovery. flash_image enables recovery to flash update.zips and some .img files. image ".img" files are whats inside the RUU ur talking about. a RUU is just a utility that whenn u run it, it will extract the includes image files to a file on ur computer. then flash those files via hboot. but it does it all automagic for u to avoid the user error part of life. just one thing about the image files though. u can flash via amon's recovery the radio, hboot, and boot.img using the flash_image comand while in amons recovery. the hboot u will never need to change most likely. it doesnt hurt to have full root (GOD MODE).

now as for fastboot. fast boot gives u the ability to flash all image files to all partitions. but it doesnt give u the big backup restore option like amon_RA recovery does. fastboot is more for dev purposes. giving a dev the ability to flash images without pushing them to the phone first and also the option to just boot the image instead of flashing it. so if it a image file doesnt do what was expected by the dev then he can just boot back into hboot menu and try the next, without having to take the extra steps of booting into recovery, pushing the next image file, flashing it and rbooting. hence the name fastboot. its fast but again this is really a dev tool. flashing or booting update.zips from fastboot i have never tried. as amon_RA recovery does this fine and lets me do a backup first.

for the use of this method of gaining root is the only time u should flash the recovery partition from fastboot. it can be done in root roms with ease if they are built correct.

there i hope i answered ur questions. sorry such a large post once u go root this way u will always have the reverse option. well as long as u have ur backup on ur sdcard. i did root this way for my wife and myself to have that security of knowing if she isnt happy with 2.1 or any other custom rom. she always has the build she knows she likes. 1.5 stock.

 

[iloveandroid]

What exactly are Radios

 

[bftb0]

toastcfh

[size=+2]AWESOME.[/size]

I'm running 1.5... with a S-OFF bootloader and Amon_RA's v1.2.6 recovery.

I need to figure out if there's any money in my Paypal account (haven't used it in 6 years), and buy both you and Amon_RA a coffee.

Gonna run out and get another SD card. Any suggestions about partitioning strategies, or whether you prefer Nandroid to BART for backup/restore, etc?

One thing you might edit in to the original instructions (step 9) is a mention to run fastboot from a root (Linux) or privileged account (Windoze), and check first that you are talking to the phone with a "fastboot devices" command. ( I got a small scare when I got to that step and forgot about needing root to write to the USB device under Ubuntu - I thought that the new bootloader was deaf for a minute there.)

bftb0

 

[toastcfh]

toastcfh

[size=+2]AWESOME.[/size]

I'm running 1.5... with a S-OFF bootloader and Amon_RA's v1.2.6 recovery.

I need to figure out if there's any money in my Paypal account (haven't used it in 6 years), and buy both you and Amon_RA a coffee.

Gonna run out and get another SD card. Any suggestions about partitioning strategies, or whether you prefer Nandroid to BART for backup/restore, etc?

One thing you might edit in to the original instructions (step 9) is a mention to run fastboot from a root (Linux) or privileged account (Windoze), and check first that you are talking to the phone with a "fastboot devices" command. ( I got a small scare when I got to that step and forgot about needing root to write to the USB device under Ubuntu - I thought that the new bootloader was deaf for a minute there.)

bftb0

Great man and I'm glad all went well. It was easy easy huh. Lol sorry bout not adding the whole root user deal. But thanx for the heads up. I will add it in as soon as I'm finished with this stupid windows install.( my hdd took a crap last week) anyhow about partitioning... I use nandroid for backups. But that doesn't make bart suck. It has some advantages over nandroid that I don't remember. Also for partitions I use ext 3 for a2sd on my heroc. But haven't hooked up the Eris yet. I will build a Rom soon that'll include a lot of goodies so keep an eye out

 

[bftb0]

Great man and I'm glad all went well. It was easy easy huh.

When I saw your original post, I actually laughed out loud as soon as I got to the part about doing the battery pull.

I had noticed that little "flashing hboot" blip that occurs right before the 2nd reboot during the many times I had re-run PB00IMG.ZIP flashes - but I never put 2+2 together the way you did.

Very nice - anyone that wants the option of rolling completely back to "factory 1.5" has that option now.

bftb0


[Edit] PS - One more minor thing - I think that use of the trackball (step #3) for confirming operations in the bootloader menu wasn't present in the OTA 1.5 (HTC) bootloader - you use the End Key in step #3 if you have the factory/OTA 1.5 bootloader on the phone (7501a_1.47.0000_091023). Not a big deal, but thought I'd mention it cuz it might confuse folks - it never mentions the trackball in the menu with the factory 1.5 bootloader.

 

[Sub-Standard]

So just to make sure I understand this fully before I attempt, step 9 requires using the PC to type commands to the phone, correct?

I'm not sure I completely understand how to do that, but would like to learn.....

 

[toastcfh]

So just to make sure I understand this fully before I attempt, step 9 requires using the PC to type commands to the phone, correct?

I'm not sure I completely understand how to do that, but would like to learn.....

Yes.. ur gonna need to download the android sdk also to make fastboot. I gave all the resources u need for gettin the sdk making and using fastboot in my first post. I myself would suggest ubuntu as a os. As u can easily use wubi to dual boot it and its a noob friendly Linux distro. Most of the things u can do to ur phone are much easier to do in Linux

 

[Sub-Standard]

So download the SDK for windows starter pack, & download ubuntu, spend a little time reading up on how to use fastboot, then attempt the tutorial.....

So just to make sure I'm very clear, this is incase you want to have a backup to get your phone back to bone stock 1.5 for warranty issues etc.... are is this just if you want to store a backup of all of your apps, settings, files?

 

[toastcfh]

I posted links to both the full sdk and the fastboot wiki and cheat sheet. If ur gonna do it through windows u need to follow the windows constructions for the sdk. If ur gonna use Linux u need to follow Linux instructions to get the sdk from the link o provided.

As for what this will backup... it will backup ur entire system and boot partitions. Including all apps settings preferences and everything else u had while stock. Leaving u with the option to restore ur device to stock specs. This will not however back up ur stock recovery and hboot partutions. U would however be able to return to stock specs. But that's a whole new tutorial. This will just leave u with the option to return to ur stock setup if u ever desire too. Like a snapshot of ur setup before u went root. Instead of just aimlessly flashing an entire build and losing everything u had before root. It just was more practical for me to still have that stock option. So if my wife wanted to go back stock she could easily. In the end to just get root. U don't have to flash the entire root build u just need to flash the GOD MODE spl (hboot.img). After that's installed u can flash anything u desire through fastboot.

 

[pkopalek]

I'm assuming something stops this process from working on Leak 2.1? And it has been tried?

Having a recovery partition installed would be clutch.

Great tutorial, fwiw. You make this community better, sir.

 

[toastcfh]

I'm assuming something stops this process from working on Leak 2.1? And it has been tried?

Having a recovery partition installed would be clutch.

Great tutorial, fwiw. You make this community better, sir.

what stops the process from working on the leak is the fact u dont have the ability to flash anything. ur not root but in the event of having root a downgrade is very possible. unrooting and using an ruu i very possible also. but yeah once u can flash amons recovery to recovery u are all set as root. the reason the we can flash this is because of the spl not an actual exploit. the spl or hboot.img give the ability to flash any partition on the phone. thats why i say flashing the entire update.zip is kinda pointless. the only part of the entire build u need is the hboot.img the build is root i believe. but from the tests ive done on the build ive found its nothing to write home about. i would suggest to anyone to go and do their homework on how to use fastboot and the rest of the sdk and root this way. the installing and using of the sdk will help to get comfortable with the device and root. all the tools u need to contribute to this and any forum are in that sdk.

and as for making this community better. i dont think i do anything different then any good dev should or would. i share all my work for free, educate those who wanna learn, help all i can that are in need, and am very open about all my workings. i hope to see more dev theads on this forum and see everyone work together as a community. this forum can and will be a place to find lots of information.

 

[los04]

very nice work toastcfh! I think this is exactly what I've been hunting for. Sorry to be obtuse, but just so I'm clear: with this method, I should be able to backup, go for the 2.1 root, and if I do not love the 2.1 root experience get back to "stock?" If I reverted to stock, is there any reason I wouldnt be able to get the long awaited 2.1 OTA? thanks for your patience with those still trying to understand all this.

 

[toastcfh]

very nice work toastcfh! I think this is exactly what I've been hunting for. Sorry to be obtuse, but just so I'm clear: with this method, I should be able to backup, go for the 2.1 root, and if I do not love the 2.1 root experience get back to "stock?" If I reverted to stock, is there any reason I wouldnt be able to get the long awaited 2.1 OTA? thanks for your patience with those still trying to understand all this.

well when u do this u will flash amon to recovery. once u do that u can backup ur stock 1.5 system and apps to nandroid or BART backup in the recovery. that will save a "snapshot" of exactly what u had stock. at that point u can flash any of the custom roms the guys around here are making. if u dont happen to like the builds they are making and wanna go back to 1.5(stock) u can and all the apps,setting,everything will be there just like u left it.

but... DO NOT try to flash the rest of the root leak as it will over right ur amon_RA recovery, but ... if u decide u want to anyhow. as soon as u flash amon_RA recovery and go in to backup/restore>restore u will still have ur 1.5(stock) snapshot on ur sdcard. well as long as u didnt wipe ur sdcard

anyhow yeah this wont give u the option to go back and flash the stock ruu that i know of but it will at least keep that stock snapshot for u to fall back on anytime u may want or need. ie for the hell of it or when u go into the verizon store .

as far as when verizon releases have no fear... ur root now. im sure either i or anothr dev will cook up a rom to be flash from recovery within the first hours of its release. i promise u that when ur root u dont worry about when the next release is. u just look foreward to the next leak. well the flashoholics do at least.

 

[droost]

Followed these directions, worked flawless. Thanks for giving us the option to go back to 1.5.

I'm now running rooted 0.3 and happy with it so far...but of course the OTA came out hours after.....

 

[toastcfh]

Followed these directions, worked flawless. Thanks for giving us the option to go back to 1.5.

I'm now running rooted 0.3 and happy with it so far...but of course the OTA came out hours after.....

thats why i say flashing the whole root build is a waist. all u really want and need is the spl.