Posted 10 January 2013 - 10:28 PM
I haven't seen too much chat in here discussing attempts to get root. I thought I would share some things I had tried but did not work for me.
First of all, how I got where I am(no root).
I did the jb upgrade, following most steps, I did not use 1.82 of Matt's tool I used 1.81.
After flashing to stock 211 and rooting using Matt's tool, I went in to su to have it check for updates, and it said it was up to date.
Did my backup, upgrade, and when I attempted to restore root, it said it worked, but did not seem to.
It seems several others experienced this situation, but I had assumed I did something wrong, and decided to flash back to 211. Unfortunately at the time, no one was posting about how that would not work.
And I found out the hard way, it did not work. It flashes most of the fastboot files, but not the boot of course. And, though it seems everything else flashed fine, it will not boot the ICS system under the JB boot image.
I was still able to sideload the JB upgrade via the restore utility, however, fastbooting to 211 wiped out my backed up root, so there is no longer any way to restore that root in JB.
What we can learn from this is that fastbooting most of the way back to 211 still lets us get the phone back up on JB, but without root.
Unfortunately since it is not possible to boot 211 with the new JB boot image, I can't run the ICS root to get root back.
If we could just somehow get ICS to boot under the JB boot setup. Maybe something like the dual booting that some people are using now, but with JB being the primary boot.(may not be possible to attain this without root of course).
I also tried modifying the fastboot system image. The concept being, if I could simply push an su-backup in to that partition, then the JB upgrade would work, and I should then be able to use a root restore utility to get root back using that su-backup. The fastboot image is not encrypted, and I was able to straight up mount the image on my filesystem and inject the su-backup. It also seemed to flash okay. However, when I attempted to boot the phone, even in to recovery mode, the phone gives an error about invalid something or another(sorry I did this over a week ago and forget exactly what it says). I assume this means that there is some sort of checksum or other security at work that prevents booting off my modified system image. Though, I also think it may simply be possible that there was something wrong about how I mounted and modified the image, perhaps I should have mounted as ext3 instead of ext4 or something of the like.
Anyway it stands, I think one path to root would be to fastboot back to 211, somehow get the su-backup in place, then upgrade to JB and use a root restore.
Of course, a true root for JB would be preferable. Perhaps the official JB release will be as vulnerable as the other Motorola JB releases are, and we will just be able to use the existing Motorola JB roots for the other phones.
I did also try several JB root methods I found for other phones, but to no avail. The restore timing one just never seemed to do anything after starting the restore option, and I could not get the debug dump one to produce the debug dump using the power and volume shortcut(I also tried running the dump from the system menu, but that didn't work either).
I'm fully willing to collaborate on root attempts, I just want root back, whoever else wants it, can have the money.
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anoopch, jcarlosfox and rjl1844 like this