Unroot Help

[Syndacate]

I meant use it to root, then follow the unrooting directions in the thread to unroot so you make sure you get it all.

z4root can be a bit sloppy. It works, but it can leave a mess.

Another option would be superoneclick. That might even unroot you.

*sigh*

This is failing absolutely miserably.

Nothing is working, there's no pound sign at the terminal prompt, so it doesn't look like a root prompt. I have no way other than the super user icon to tell if the phone is rooted or not, I tried rooting the phone, but can't verify that it's even rooted so I can try unrooting it.

z4root just quits at some point, I'm not even sure if it worked or not, just goes back to applications, like it crashed. I think I'm going to try using the ragebin method...arg...this is annoying as hell..

 

[Syndacate]

I'm pretty sure this thing is completely ****ed beyond all repair.

90% of the **** in terminal emulator doesn't work, can't write to the tmp directory, can't use cp without telling busybox to use it. Can't even copy rage anywhere to run it for that root. The z4root is just failing silently (or working silently, I don't know), getting permission denied all over the place. Adb isn't working for ****.

Arggggggg. The only thing I have left is to try adding ADB to the path var and try to push rage remotely. I have no idea what to do, this thing is definitely hosed atm as far as rooting or unrooting goes, and I can't tell the state of it worth of ****. Not like there's a big green light that tells you if you're rooted or not :-\.

 

[furbearingmammal]

Alright, I'm going to see about getting an expert on the Fascinate in here for you.

 

[Syndacate]

Good luck. If that doesn't work we'll see what else we can do for you.

lol, the terminal methodology doesn't work (at all), says I don't have access to the /tmp folder, that's my main issue...I mean I suppose realistically I should be able to run it right off the sdcard but I'm not sure if they did anything stupid like put a relative path in there and I don't want to completely screw it up, it's already in some foggy ass state where I'm not even sure if it's rooted or not.

If it's rooted, will opening terminal emulator open to a root shell or allow to switch to the default user ("su")? Or do you have to "do something" to the "terminal emulator" application to give the app root privs?

When I get back from class (around 12:30 or so) I'm going to try putting adb into my win path var and running the commands via USB.

--

I'm not new to computers or *nix or anything, so I don't mind doing CLI work or anything, and for the most part have an idea what I'm doing. It's simply that there seems to be like 40,000 ways to root, and none of them seem to be able to help me .

All the roots seem to circle around the same concept, though, which is:
- Replace busybox
- Replace the SU binary
- Add the Superuser.apk
- Run Superuser.apk.

I just want to make it sure I can take it to the VZW store and get my damn camera fixed - I have insurance on it, I'd like to be able to take photos. I had a BB storm for 2 years prior to this, always used the latest and greatest beta OS..which never supported the camera as they never had plans of releasing it, so I know what it's like to be constantly stuck w/o a camera, and it blows hardcore...

At this point I'm even considering SBF imaging it, but I'd hate to lose everything . I'll try running rage externally when I get back.

 

[Mujibar]

@Syndacate:

You should first back up the apps you installed with Titanium, because the process I'm gonna suggest will get rid of all data and put you back to unrooted stock state. Once you get a replacement phone, you can re-root and easily restore your apps.

First, download the Samsung drivers and Odin (software that runs on your PC) from the OP in this thread at Fascinate Forums. Install the drivers to your PC and copy Odin to your desktop or some other location where you can easily find it. Then go to this link over at XDA forums to get the full "DL09.tar.md5" file from the OP. Save that somewhere on your PC. Next, follow these steps:

1. Put your phone into download mode, as follows:
- Connect the USB cable that came w/ the phone to your computer.
- Turn off the phone & pull the battery.
- Hold the volume down button and plug the USB cable into the phone (you should see a yellow triangle w/ an Android digging).
2. Open Odin on your computer (you should see a yellow bar indicating that your phone is connected to a COM port).
3. Click the "PDA" button (DO NOT CLICK THE "PHONE" BUTTON) and select the "DL09.tar.md5" file you downloaded to your computer earlier.
4. Click "Start" and let the procedure finish. Disconnect your phone when you see a green box in Odin that says "PASS."
5. Put the battery back in and turn your phone on.

If all goes as it should, your phone will be unrooted & back to stock, ready for you to take in to Verizon. This will be build DL09 (you can verify by going to Settings > About phone and checking Baseband version and Build number). You can also set up the phone w/ your Gmail account & get all your emails back.

When you get your new phone w/ functional camera, come on over to Fascinate Forums. We can get you re-rooted and up & running w/ Froyo. Good luck!

 

[Syndacate]

@Syndacate:

You should first back up the apps you installed with Titanium, because the process I'm gonna suggest will get rid of all data and put you back to unrooted stock state. Once you get a replacement phone, you can re-root and easily restore your apps.

First, download the Samsung drivers and Odin (software that runs on your PC) from the OP in this thread at Fascinate Forums. Install the drivers to your PC and copy Odin to your desktop or some other location where you can easily find it. Then go to this link over at XDA forums to get the full "DL09.tar.md5" file from the OP. Save that somewhere on your PC. Next, follow these steps:

1. Put your phone into download mode, as follows:
- Connect the USB cable that came w/ the phone to your computer.
- Turn off the phone & pull the battery.
- Hold the volume down button and plug the USB cable into the phone (you should see a yellow triangle w/ an Android digging).
2. Open Odin on your computer (you should see a yellow bar indicating that your phone is connected to a COM port).
3. Click the "PDA" button (DO NOT CLICK THE "PHONE" BUTTON) and select the "DL09.tar.md5" file you downloaded to your computer earlier.
4. Click "Start" and let the procedure finish. Disconnect your phone when you see a green box in Odin that says "PASS."
5. Put the battery back in and turn your phone on.

If all goes as it should, your phone will be unrooted & back to stock, ready for you to take in to Verizon. This will be build DL09 (you can verify by going to Settings > About phone and checking Baseband version and Build number). You can also set up the phone w/ your Gmail account & get all your emails back.

When you get your new phone w/ functional camera, come on over to Fascinate Forums. We can get you re-rooted and up & running w/ Froyo. Good luck!

Wow, I feel bad that you wrote that and I was just about to come back and say I was actually making some head-way. Okay, so I gathered the basic concept of this root, and decided to take a stab at it externally. I got the binary onto the phone, ran it, got the root in.

I then had trouble pushing busybox and su due to the ro filesystem, I fixed that by remounting the fs as rw, using this line:
mount -o rw,remount -t ext3 /dev/block/mmcblk1p21 /system

It took like 3x before that line actually did something (2 typos maybe, but doubtful), but it finally remounted the fs after unplugging it and plugging back in.

Then I was able to re-push the su, busybox bins, as well as the Superuser.apk package. I then set the permissions to 4755 to make them acessable from terminal to give R/X perms to everybody.

I then went into the terminal emulator, typed su, and got the prompt for root access, which I allowed, and I got a root shell. FINALLY.

I didn't bother re-mounting the FS as RO because I'm going to undo all of this.

----- Now to unroot I'd like to avoid re-flashing if at all possible

Right, so obviously still fails to contact camera every time, so still want to take it back, so now for the unrooting.

Obviously it just replaced the su and busybox binaries, I'm assuming that I need to replace them with the OEM ones (are there OEM ones, or were these just from the original root)?

As I said before, I have no trouble doing things from the CLI (big linux guy, here), and I rather do so, then let a script blindly do it and me keeping my fingers crossed.

So now what should I do to unroot, I'm guessing su existed, it was just an unhacked version, I'm thinking busybox could have gone either way, so I'm not sure if I should just remove them, or look for OEM replacements.

As for the Superuser.apk package, I'm assuming I can't just rm that, right?

Then there's the exploit binary, the rage image which pushes the actual exploit...I'm not sure where it pushes the exploit, but now I got to get whatever it screwed with, back to its OEM state...no idea how to do that.

Okay, so now that I understand the system a lot more, understand how this root works a lot better, I'm much happier, haha. That being said, now that this is full rooted, I need to unroot this now.

What would you say is the best course of action for me for a manual unroot?

EDIT:
PS: The FS will remount as RO on reboot, won't it? Should follow whatever is in the mount list (fstab?), so I shouldn't even need to remount it manually as RO as long as I restart..

PPS: As for the first root procedure I did (the original one), I looked at the files, not sure where titanium backup came in, but in essence it was the drivers for Galaxy S (which I had to reinstall for adb to see the phone, ironically enough), the rage bin, su, busybox, Superuser.apk, and a script to do all of the rooting for you, the adb shell, and the requried adb runtime libraries. That's why I had no idea what happened when I rooted, it just ran the local shell it had, pushed everything to the phone, kicked it off, and that was that.

 

[Mujibar]

Well, you're now officially over my head. My knowledge of ADB is pathetic, at best. Can't really help you with a manual unroot. There are folks over at XDA that could probably help you out.

But honestly, you would have to put much more effort into finding out how to manually unroot than it would take to flash back to stock and manually re-root.

 

[Syndacate]

Well, you're now officially over my head. My knowledge of ADB is pathetic, at best. Can't really help you with a manual unroot. There are folks over at XDA that could probably help you out.

But honestly, you would have to put much more effort into finding out how to manually unroot than it would take to flash back to stock and manually re-root.

ADB is just an interaction tool, not much to it. Push uploads, shell opens a shell in the phone, so on and so forth. Tools like this are typically used for computer interaction with RTOS devices, because it's easy to chain things together, like:
adb push thisFile /here
adb shell /here/thisFile

Anyway, I'm seriously thinking about what you're saying, it's probably a wiser choice, as it will guarantee everything is as it was. Though I'd like to know more about it...I'll probably check out the XDA forums, and if I can't find anything, I'll reflash.

How dangerous is reflashing using this method? External flash is obviously safer than the proposed internal flash somebody mentioned in here, but still, how safe is it? Is the brick it could create recoverable?

Also, this is a platform only image, right? Doesn't have anything to do with the SDCard or anything, right? Just the system & base application images?

 

[Mujibar]

FWIW, I've been searching for ways to manually unroot and haven't been able to find any, even at XDA forums. Everyone who has needed to has always been told to Odin restore back to stock. Sorry.

 

[Syndacate]

FWIW, I've been searching for ways to manually unroot and haven't been able to find any, even at XDA forums. Everyone who has needed to has always been told to Odin restore back to stock. Sorry.

Arg, that's annoying.

Somebody has to know, if somebody knows more about how the hack actually works, then reversing it is easier.

Like if busybox didn't exist, it's just removing it, su is probably just finding the OEM su binary, and Superuser.apk can probably just be uninstalled. Only thing I have absolutely no idea about is the rage exploit, depending on how that works, it may be recoverable..

Somebody had to snag the originals "just in case."

 

[furbearingmammal]

Samsung phones might not be locked down like the latest gems from Motorola, but I'll be buggered if they're not locked down somehow. Sorry.

 

[Mujibar]

How dangerous is reflashing using this method? External flash is obviously safer than the proposed internal flash somebody mentioned in here, but still, how safe is it? Is the brick it could create recoverable?

I don't believe it's dangerous at all. I've heard of people occasionally having problems w/ it, but a re-flash seemed to take care of any issues they might've had.

Also, this is a platform only image, right? Doesn't have anything to do with the SDCard or anything, right? Just the system & base application images?

Correct. Nothing on your SD card will be affected. That's why backing up w/ Titanium will allow you to restore apps later. They're all backed up to SD.

Allow me to plug Fascinate Forums one more time. DF is great, but we've got a ton of folks over there dedicated to this particular phone. :icon_ banana:

 

[Mujibar]

Only thing I have absolutely no idea about is the rage exploit, depending on how that works, it may be recoverable..

From what I understand, the rage exploit has been locked down by Google in Android 2.2.2 and up (because of the recent malware found in the Market).

Google pulls Market apps with root exploit -- one patched in AOSP, but you probably didn't get it | Android Central

 

[Syndacate]

Only thing I have absolutely no idea about is the rage exploit, depending on how that works, it may be recoverable..

From what I understand, the rage exploit has been locked down by Google in Android 2.2.2 and up (because of the recent malware found in the Market).

Google pulls Market apps with root exploit -- one patched in AOSP, but you probably didn't get it | Android Central

That's okay, Verizon doesn't seem to give enough of a **** about this phone to release Froyo for it.

Although I'm not entirely looking forward to Froyo. I mean sure, flash is nice, but if anything I'm going to watch youtube and there's an app for that...but I don't agree with Google's philosophy on the application prefetching idea. Google's spin on it is "You shouldn't worry about it, because it takes the same amount of battery life to hold the rate in its current state, empty, as it dos to hold it in its current state, full" - which is 100% true, but my take on it is "I don't want to have to wait for programs that YOU THINK I want running to save off and get paged out of RAM before the program I just clicked on's image is faulted into RAM" - so :-\. Doesn't matter, VZW will never release Froyo, and I'm not sure how much I want to run a leaked/cracked version of Froyo..

EDIT:
Titanium backup just backs up all apps to your SDCard, right? Doesn't touch contacts, or interface with the computer, or anything?

EDIT 2:
@ Fur: Locked down in what sense?

 

[furbearingmammal]

It's not VZW, it's Samsung that would be responsible for the FroYo update -- and rumor has it that Samsung wants a pretty penny to release ANY upgrade to the software.