OBSOLETE THREAD
GO HERE
http://androidforums.com/avail-all-...kmod-recovery-non-rooted-avail-permanent.html
GO HERE
http://androidforums.com/avail-all-...kmod-recovery-non-rooted-avail-permanent.html
Very nice stayboogy glad to see you are making good progress.
Thanks a Million. I unbox'd a new merit ST. bootup while pluged into pc put your zip on root of sd card and then follow'd your instructions and made A CWM backup I'm uploading it to my GDrive and I will post a link when Its done.
PS: I used 7z to compress it 50%
and again THANKS I also downloaded your stock but rooted CWM rom I have'nt Tried to load it yet I'll let you Know how I made out
I rooted my avail in june with the tcard downgrade and the dialer codes so when my wife wanted a smartphone I talked her into the Avail as well (thinking the root would be cake). After 10+ failed tcard flashes, I even tried to manually root her Avail but I couldn't get it to keep root after a reboot. I gave up and told her I couldn't root it but she wasn't mad...
Forward to this week and I see this thread pop up and immediately this popped into my head:
can I flash this CWM to her non rooted phone and then use CWM to restore one of my nandroid backups? AND, would that then transfer the root to her phone as well? (without losing it during reboots)?
The main reason I even want to spend any more time on her phone is that the limited app space has already come up a few times.
thanks!
Nice! Thanks for the quick reply stayboogy
Now to see if I can pry it out of her hands for a bit!
I installed the upright CWM on my phone. I still had the upside down 5.0.2.0 CWM version and it kinda bugged me too.
Next was her phone but she had gone to bed with an alarm set so I snuck in and grabbed it all ninja like
The stock recovery does have the option to install update.zip from the sd card so I ran it on her's and up popped CWM!
I immediately made a nandroid backup in CWM (stock/unrooted) and then backed up her entire sd card to my computer. I put my 2nd nandroid backup on her sd card (I tweaked in stages and created nandroids along the way).
Here's where it gets weird: I turn the phone off and boot into recovery (menu and vol+) to wipe the phone/data/cache/etc and what pop's back up? The stock android recovery menu. After testing it a few times the CWM recovery says it installs and runs normally, but upon reboot the stock recovery is back
I ran the update.zip file again from the sd card and up popped CWM again. I then used it to restore my nandroid backup from the card and then wiped everything to be sure. After a lengthy boot I could tell the restore worked because the bootanimation and sound were gone.
After it settled down for a few mins I set up her google account. Root checker stated that root access was not available. I'm curious as to why the root didn't make it over?
Anywho, I looked around and noticed that my build number had dropped from b19 to b14 so I tried the dial codes. I was able to get root and disable QID
Everything is fine on the root end so far, su rights are getting granted and root checker says yes. I was able to remove bloat and speed it up so she's happy!
If there's anything I should check or verify please list it because I will definitely be hearing about any problems with it. When I handed it back to her all I told her was "I rooted it, cleared up a ton of app space and sped up sd card reads/writes by almost 20 times". She asked what that would help and I had her open the gallery app and she about flipped
Thanks again
i'm not quite sure how that can happen...
but, even when you have cwm recovery on the phone, it will backup the stock recovery every time. don't ask me how that happens, but it does. all my nandroids have a recovery.img in them that is 6144KB which is the size of the stock recovery.img--and they are made using cwm recovery and even after restore cwm is still on the phone which is only 4654KB.
it could be that cwm runs from the cache when you use the update.zip method on an unrooted phone, and since you are in recovery already it can't flash it right away and instead does it upon next boot--and since you wiped the cache and everything that is why stock recovery come back up. of course this is a stretch and is just my attempt at trying to reason how that is possible in the first place.
either way, i'm glad you got it rooted.
as far as not having root after restoring a nandroid of your rooted phone--that doesn't make any sense. people have used my stock rooted nandroid to root their phones that were unrooted and it stuck on their's...
unless att did something to the phone to prevent rooting in B19, which i'm not sure what they could've done, it should have been just fine.
weird is definitely what this all is. but again, either way you got it done and now it's rooted so, glad for you and glad there's testimony my update.zip works
I am pretty sure the reason for the odd behavior being seen here is explained here.
" There is also another important file you
should know about. In /system/
recovery.img there is a full copy of
everything that is loaded on mtd1. This
file is automatically flashed onto mtd1
every time you shut down. That means
two things: 1. Any changes you make
directly to /dev/mtd/mtd1 get blown
away on reboot and 2. If you want to
change /dev/mtd/mtd1 you're probably
better off just sticking the image in /
system/recovery.img and rebooting.
When creating your own custom
update.zip files (especially when adapting
the stock images), you can get tripped up
if you forget to replace /system/
recovery.img and it ends up overwriting /
dev/mtd/mtd1 unbeknownst to you.
Watch out."
This is an excerpt from an article found here. HOWTO: Unpack, Edit, and Re-Pack Boot Images - Android Wiki
It's not a big problem, I'm sure with this information stayboogy will be able to fix this in a snap. If he feels it is even necessary.
but that information isn't true (all the time anyway). there is no recovery.img file in that location or any other location on our phones. i've looked up and down and left and right because i've read that same thing in other places...
and it doesn't get flashed every boot because i've rebooted my phone dozens upon dozens of times since installing cwm and it's still there.
unless there's a way to make that file invisible to root su access, i don't think that information is correct.
another reason i don't believe that thread is because the way they have given directions for unpacking and repacking .img files is bunk and doesn't work like it's supposed to. believe me, that tutorial is what got me into actually 'building' cwm for our phone because unpacking and repacking didn't work for the upside down image.
so i'm not really sure what happened with your phone unless it's what i mentioned above about being in the cache until it was properly flashed at reboot.
what matters is that it worked in the end LOL
I see stayboogy is already on top of it. Hmmm if that is incorrect I am unsure. The method for repack in that thread does work though because I have done it and the images boot perfectly. It's just that the tools for doing so in that thread suck. I was able to find a better set of tools which I thought I posted a link to. And they work flawlessly. But it doesn't matter your method works perfect, and unpacking and repacking from what I have seen serves no purpose unless you want to change the images in the recovery LOL.
yeah, i'm not sure how you got them unpacked and repacked and they still booted. that wasn't happening here lol
it's for the best though that it didn't work for me; i've gotten more enjoyment out of playing in the sdk
ok, any idea why the update.zip starts CWM but doesn't overwrite the recovery partition?
for now I'm leaving the update.zip on the sd card since I won't be flashing her phone much (if at all)
thanks
Thanks a Million. I unbox'd a new merit ST. bootup while pluged into pc put your zip on root of sd card and then follow'd your instructions and made A CWM backup I'm uploading it to my GDrive and I will post a link when Its done.
PS: I used 7z to compress it 50%
and again THANKS I also downloaded your stock but rooted CWM rom I have'nt Tried to load it yet I'll let you Know how I made out
Here is a link to GDrive (Stock ZTE Merit_clockworkmod.7z)
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4BoCRM5_3JNQlRMYWd0THhDV0k
Stayboogy have a look at this stayboogy update.zip update-script - Pastebin.com
It is your update-script from the update.zip after you look through it I bet you will be able to figure out why the recovery flash is not perminant.
but see the thing is i didn't build the updater-script
cyanogen sdk does this automatically
but i see your point. it doesn't actually flash recovery.img
and you know, when it was built i was curious why it had every other file but the actual recovery.img in it.
maybe i'll see about fixing that, only thing is, i'm not good with building update.zip files.
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