356 replies to this topic

[mattlgroff]

YOU CANNOT USE THIS ON THE LATEST UPDATE. IF IN DOUBT DON'T TRY IT.

This is ONLY for the Huawei MyTouch 4G from T-Mobile! This will not work on any other phone!

This phone does not have a trackball or physical keyboard, and is not by LG or HTC

THIS WORKS ON THE HUAWEI MYTOUCH 4G Slide Keyboard too!

Download(s) for Windows:

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Instructions for Windows:
Install the

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. (These are included in the zip above now)
Plug in the phone and have it booted like normal. Do NOT mount USB Storage.
Enable USB Debugging. (Settings > Applications > Developer Options)
Extract the zip above, and run the Root.bat. Done.

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Download(s) for Linux:

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Instructions for Linux:
Plug in the phone and have it booted like normal. Do NOT mount USB Storage.
Enable USB Debugging. (Settings > Applications > Developer Options).
Extract the downloaded zip from above to anywhere in your machine and 'cd' into the folder with terminal.
Example:

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Run the bash script as admin. Enter password if asked. If you error make sure the Root.sh is executable. (In Ubuntu, right click, Properties, check Executable)

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Follow the onscreen instructions.

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Download(s) for Mac:

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Instructions for Mac:

Plug in the phone and have it booted like normal. Do NOT mount USB Storage.
Enable USB Debugging. (Settings > Applications > Developer Options).
Extract the downloaded zip from above to anywhere in your machine and 'cd' into the folder with terminal.

Example:

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Run the bash script as admin. Enter password if asked. If you error make sure the Root.sh is executable. Read the included document for more information.

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Follow the onscreen instructions.

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Thanks to stealthmouse and obeygiant for modifying my Razr Utility to Mac/Linux by following that I ported my Windows Root for Huawei MyTouch 4G to Mac/Linux

Edited by mattlgroff, 10 December 2012 - 04:52 PM.
Fixed links

[mattlgroff]

World's First Rooted Huawei MyTouch 4G!

and.. the crappy flash version.

and... a screenshot.

[Thach]

Great job on this. Hopefully we see more people rolling in to check out this grab bag of pure awesomeness.

[Rom Breaker]

Gingerbread?? AHHH!!! Run away!!

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

[mattlgroff]

Gingerbread?? AHHH!!! Run away!!

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

It's definitely capable of running Jellybean with 1GB of ram. Just need CWM and the build to not hate me so much.

[jb0nez]

Well done. I'll be trying this as soon as my wife gets home. What are the chances of a brick with this method? Would you consider it very safe/reliable? Can I ask any details about how you managed to do it?

Edit: I'm just a bit hesitant...only because my wife needs her phone for work, if it were mine I'd be all over this. Any other confirmed success or failure with this method? Looks pretty elegant according to the .bat, simply fastbooting off a file sent via USB, not writing any files to the device until it's pushing the su on, not replacing recovery, etc, but I think I'd just be worried about getting stuck in fastboot mode or something.

[mattlgroff]

Well done. I'll be trying this as soon as my wife gets home. What are the chances of a brick with this method? Would you consider it very safe/reliable? Can I ask any details about how you managed to do it?

Edit: I'm just a bit hesitant...only because my wife needs her phone for work, if it were mine I'd be all over this. Any other confirmed success or failure with this method? Looks pretty elegant according to the .bat, simply fastbooting off a file sent via USB, not writing any files to the device until it's pushing the su on, not replacing recovery, etc, but I think I'd just be worried about getting stuck in fastboot mode or something.

This phone is very unbrickable. I rooted my phone with this (more than a few times now) and can 100% say this will not brick you. This uses "fastboot boot InsecureKernel.img" instead of a "fastboot flash" to ensure this even more. Worst case you reboot and everything is normal, but it would never get to that point.

When you boot the phone by holding both volume keys and the power button you will get a pink screen. If you are on linux or have the drivers installed on Windows, you will get a mounted drive, which contains boot.img and the recovery.img. I ran the boot.img through my insecure kernel tool I got from a buddy at XDA a while back and made an insecure boot.img. What an "insecure" kernel means is that if you boot using it your "adb shell" will automatically be root access on boot while using it. I use "fastboot boot InsecureKernel.img" to boot the device once with this method to mount /system/ so we can put su binary, Superuser.apk, and busybox in their respective places and set the right permissions. The phone then reboots and the InsecureKernel was like it was never there.

You cannot get stuck in any mode actually, just battery pull and unplug.

If you do crazy stuff with root on your own and "brick" you simply boot into a linux distro and replace the drive that pops up with the /system/ with a system pull while in Pink Screen mode.

Sorry if I got too technical, but you did indeed ask

[tucstwo]

Holy crap, that exploit finds a hole as ancient as the G1s was. Wow, they must have figured no one would bother messing with this device! Nice deal Matt.

[gscape]

I'm having difficulties getting this to work on my Mac. I end up with this in the terminal:

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And the phone remains unrooted. Any ideas?

Thank you!

[mattlgroff]

I'm having difficulties getting this to work on my Mac. I end up with this in the terminal:

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And the phone remains unrooted. Any ideas? Thank you!

Dang, the mac version I seemed to have forgotten an important line..

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I will add it back in and reupload. Apologies.

EDIT: It is reuploaded. Same link as before.

[gscape]

Thank you, thank you! Worked like a charm. Any hope of getting ICS+ on here?

[mattlgroff]

Thank you, thank you! Worked like a charm. Any hope of getting ICS+ on here?

Might be some indeed! I got CWM up and 80% working lol. It is tethered though.

[jb0nez]

Thank you for the explanation. Not too technical at all. So simple and elegant, well played my friend!

Now we need to discuss what bloat can be safely removed. I noticed some system apps (slacker, telenavgps, tmobile41) are installed into /data/data; Titanium backup backs them up ok but can't uninstall, says it can't find the apk. Now that I have a root shell I can rm them and have done so for some like slacker and telenavgps but the TmobileMall one, the MobileLife Contacts, T-Mobile My Account, I'm afraid to rm as I don't know if the phone will boot without them. We need to make a list of the bloat that safe to remove; if I were to remove the wrong thing I'd have trouble getting it back I'm sure. I'd probably need someone to send me the file and somehow mount the sdcard and put the files back or something.

Edit: I RM'd telenavgps -- rebooted and the damn thing was back!!! WTF?

Edit2: It seems they have some odd huaweivfs type file system - not sure if it's a cache or what. If you do
find /system /data -name *telenav*
you see all sorts of interesting things. I again removed it from /data/data, made sure to stop the service first. Did a find command again, nothing came up. Rebooted and IT WAS BACK!

Edit 3: This is so wierd. I can't find the apk that telenav is coming from, wildtangent is coming from, tmobiletv, etc. I think there's a master apk in /data/app that gets run on startup and installs those. Cause I blow away the /data/data dir for them, as that's all that comes up on a find, but they all come back after a reboot...

[mattlgroff]

Thank you for the explanation. Not too technical at all. So simple and elegant, well played my friend!

Now we need to discuss what bloat can be safely removed. I noticed some system apps (slacker, telenavgps, tmobile41) are installed into /data/data; Titanium backup backs them up ok but can't uninstall, says it can't find the apk. Now that I have a root shell I can rm them and have done so for some like slacker and telenavgps but the TmobileMall one, the MobileLife Contacts, T-Mobile My Account, I'm afraid to rm as I don't know if the phone will boot without them. We need to make a list of the bloat that safe to remove; if I were to remove the wrong thing I'd have trouble getting it back I'm sure. I'd probably need someone to send me the file and somehow mount the sdcard and put the files back or something.

Edit: I RM'd telenavgps -- rebooted and the damn thing was back!!! WTF?

Edit2: It seems they have some odd huaweivfs type file system - not sure if it's a cache or what. If you do
find /system /data -name *telenav*
you see all sorts of interesting things. I again removed it from /data/data, made sure to stop the service first. Did a find command again, nothing came up. Rebooted and IT WAS BACK!

Edit 3: This is so wierd. I can't find the apk that telenav is coming from, wildtangent is coming from, tmobiletv, etc. I think there's a master apk in /data/app that gets run on startup and installs those. Cause I blow away the /data/data dir for them, as that's all that comes up on a find, but they all come back after a reboot...

They are on a protected image that we cannot edit yet

[jb0nez]

Ahhhhh. This phone is very different from other android devices I've rooted and debloated. Huawei did some odd stuff. the phone is surprisingly nice for the price, though. Much snappier than my Samsung Galaxy S 4g.
So next steps are figure out how to debloat by accessing that protected image, and figure out how to get a proper recovery and new ROMs. The former I'm into, the latter I'm not, I'm fine with Gingerbread. Thank you for your efforts! I was able to install the hiddden Cerberus anti theft app into /system so it will survive a factory reset, and that was my main goal. Debloat is secondary.

[mattlgroff]

Ahhhhh. This phone is very different from other android devices I've rooted and debloated. Huawei did some odd stuff. the phone is surprisingly nice for the price, though. Much snappier than my Samsung Galaxy S 4g. So next steps are figure out how to debloat by accessing that protected image, and figure out how to get a proper recovery and new ROMs. The former I'm into, the latter I'm not, I'm fine with Gingerbread. Thank you for your efforts! I was able to install the hiddden Cerberus anti theft app into /system so it will survive a factory reset, and that was my main goal. Debloat is secondary.

My test rom didn't go so well :/ bootloops...bootloops everywhere!

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/15093625/Clockworkmod%20Pheonix.zip
Run the batch and temp boot to CWM, select is the camera key, power key is the back key, and volumes are move.

It has random reboots so it is not something to be toyed with easily, but if you need a flash a small zip it should do the trick. This is possible of causing a brick if it crashes while flashing a rom after flashing /system/

[saxman2k]

Hopefully someone can help me. I follow all of the instructions but I still cant get it to work. I'm running windows 7. I install the drivers, plug in the phone, enable usb debugging, then click on "root." From here the command promt pops up and says "daemon not running. Starting it now on port 5037. Daemon started successfully." Then it say, "waiting for device." At this point my phone attemps to reboot, but ultimately hangs on the "android 4g tomobile sceen." No matter how long I wait, it just hangs there, and the command promt just hangs on "wating for device."

Any help would be greatly, greatly appriciated!

[ogodslayero]

@Saxman2k After installing the drivers click start then find drivertools in your start menu open that and select install drivers.

[saxman2k]

thanks for the response. already took that step though so im still in the same boat.

[mattlgroff]

thanks for the response. already took that step though so im still in the same boat.

Yeah its either drivers or the USB Cable or the USB port you are using. You can try a different machine. I'll be in the chatroom for a bit

[jb0nez]

Would you say the CWM is stable/functional enough to perform a full ROM backup and restore? That way I'd feel more confident messing with the bloat and other stuff.

My test rom didn't go so well :/ bootloops...bootloops everywhere!

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Run the batch and temp boot to CWM, select is the camera key, power key is the back key, and volumes are move.

It has random reboots so it is not something to be toyed with easily, but if you need a flash a small zip it should do the trick. This is possible of causing a brick if it crashes while flashing a rom after flashing /system/

[mrsteel74]

While I haven't had a chance to try your root method I found on Huawei's website the link to their open source kernel for gingerbread if anyone wants it here is a link for it

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=

[mattlgroff]

Would you say the CWM is stable/functional enough to perform a full ROM backup and restore? That way I'd feel more confident messing with the bloat and other stuff.

Honestly I would say its enough to backup and restore. The software for it is iffy, let alone the random reboots it has. Even flashing isn't safe. If you "have" to flash something, you can do a small file. I tested flashing SuperSu.zip in and it worked fine, but when I tried to backup the phone rebooted halfway through.

While I haven't had a chance to try your root method I found on Huawei's website the link to their open source kernel for gingerbread if anyone wants it here is a link for it

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=

Nice find!

[dynaemu]

I am also getting stuck at the booting screen. I installed the drivers while the phone was still plugged, tried without it pluged, they all installed correctly. I tried 3 different USB cables and it is still stuck. Any idea?

[jb0nez]

When you have the phone plugged in and type "adb devices" does it show your phone? If you type "adb shell" do you get a shell prompt? If so, as far as I know, the drivers are installed correctly...unless while in fastboot the USB PID/VID stuff is different and the computer can't see the phone anymore? When you plug the phone into your computer, it mounts a small drive with drivers on it. I took the Huawei specific text out of the andrdoid_winusb.inf file in therer and put it into my own (I tihnk that's the name of the file, it's something similar if not) in the Google toolkit just to make sure the Google drivers could communicate with it. I never even installed the drivers that come with this root program.

Edit:
These are the lines I added, which I got from their driver directory

;Huawei Ideos
%CompositeAdbInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_12D1&PID_1038&MI_01
%SingleBootLoaderInterface% = USB_Install, USB\VID_12D1&PID_103A

Into this file:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\extras\google\usb_driver\anrdoid_winusb.inf.

I double checked in device manager that that was the correct PID/VID I see when I plug the phone in. It should show up under device manager as "Android Phone -> Android Composite ADB Interface" in device manager. If all of the above is the correct and the case for you, then it's beyond my skill level.

Edit2: If you look at the android_winusb.inf that's in the phone's drivers dir, it has one line commented out - the 1038 line. I took that one, not the PID_1050 line, since my computer sees it the 1038 one. Don't know if this has any bearing on anything.

[dynaemu]

When you have the phone plugged in and type "adb devices" does it show your phone? If you type "adb shell" do you get a shell prompt? If so, as far as I know, the drivers are installed correctly...unless while in fastboot the USB PID/VID stuff is different and the computer can't see the phone anymore? When you plug the phone into your computer, it mounts a small drive with drivers on it. I took the Huawei specific text out of the andrdoid_winusb.inf file in therer and put it into my own (I tihnk that's the name of the file, it's something similar if not) in the Google toolkit just to make sure the Google drivers could communicate with it. I never even installed the drivers that come with this root program.

Yeah it shows my device and the shell pops up when I type "adb shell" (without quotations of course). I have no idea what's going on haha. It still shows it when it's stuck in the boot screen. I have to remove the battery every time this happens for it to work.

However, I turned off USB debugging, unplugged, plugged, unplugged, turned it back on, and plugged again. Now when it's stuck in the boot screen I heard the sound that tells you something is plugged into the USB, except it skips about 4 times and the phone doesnt load after that. Nor does the phone's drive pop up in My Computer either.

EDIT: I'll take a look at all that and get back to you.

EDIT2: Odd, I don't have an Android folder in my Program Files folder.

[saxman2k]

Thanks for the responses. I tried a different cable, and tried a different computer. No go.

[jb0nez]

Well, that's just the directory to where I chose to install the Android SDK. You may have chosen a different directory. You DO have it installed right? I thought that was a basic pre-requisite to rooting, so as to get the Google drivers and adb etc.

[jamonthis]

Ahhhhh. This phone is very different from other android devices I've rooted and debloated. Huawei did some odd stuff. the phone is surprisingly nice for the price, though. Much snappier than my Samsung Galaxy S 4g.
So next steps are figure out how to debloat by accessing that protected image, and figure out how to get a proper recovery and new ROMs. The former I'm into, the latter I'm not, I'm fine with Gingerbread. Thank you for your efforts! I was able to install the hiddden Cerberus anti theft app into /system so it will survive a factory reset, and that was my main goal. Debloat is secondary.

When you install an update to one of these apps lets use the, yahoo mail on for example, it will show in the /system/app or /data/app. The problem is the apk before the update is in /cust/t-mobile/us/app which is read only and unable to be mounted as R/W and that is why Titanium backup is unable to uninstall it.

I have tried moving it and deleting it manually with no luck. I have not tried through ADB yet but may give that a try next.

[dynaemu]

Well, that's just the directory to where I chose to install the Android SDK. You may have chosen a different directory. You DO have it installed right? I thought that was a basic pre-requisite to rooting, so as to get the Google drivers and adb etc.

Hmm, no I do not. I didn't know you needed it. All it said is have your phone is USB Debug and do not mount the SD card.