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Root ZTE ZMAX Pro (Z981) root discussion

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still plugging away but no go as of yet. with phone off, i held volume +, volume -, and power. that puts the phone in dfu mode and drivers from the qualcomm driver pack install. not sure what dfu mode is for though
 
Hey try "adb reboot bootloader" or "adb reboot fastboot" and keep entering "fastboot devices" until home screen, or try fastboot commands in dfu mode.
 
yes, screen was black and home button was lit. fastboot commands do nothing. I'm stuck. Qualcomm updated the mode we need and we cant dump recovery=( I'm done as i dont want to brick my device messing around anymore
 
Looks like we're in 700+ positions away from the top 200 for kingroot. With all the foreign brands before us kingroot may never get us.
 
well hopefully kingroot incorporates the quadroot exploits into their app or something pans out with this edl mode. I almost wish i would have just gotten the idol 3 again. it was a great phone with MM on it.
 
Hey wasn't someone saying we have our kernel source? Well it was useless before but now after my digging we have a method to flash stuff, so why don't we just cook up a cf-autoroot kernel and flash that in EDL?
 
Ya i uploaded the kernel source for the z988 on xda. You can grab the source for your model from zte open source website
 
if only I knew how to build a kernel... I believe I have the hardware requirements I just don't know how to set it all up.
 
paragontrix said:
Yeah id just wait until pumaa comes online cause I think he may have something to try and flash ready to go, even if not it's not hard to compile a kernel if you have the source code for your devices kernel and in this case cf auto root source, but from a quick look around I don't think chainfire released the auto root source code but I did find this
https://github.com/tgalal/inception/wiki/incept-autoroot
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If we can flash things, anyway you could just pull the system IMG and manually root it and just flash it back with root? From that point you should be able to pull the rest of the things required to make a proper root?
 
jaykoerner said:
If we can flash things, anyway you could just pull the system IMG and manually root it and just flash it back with root? From that point you should be able to pull the rest of the things required to make a proper root?
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We do have adb from the bootloader, I'm pretty sure someone has pulled a system IMG already right?
 
You don't even need the phone to get a stock system image you can download them offline or get them from the manufacturers web website etc. It's ota so they always have the firmware files to get
 
So how would you root the pulled system image? I have never rooted anything this way before, then again, most of the Android phones. I have had were ridiculously easy to root, and before that it was the Palm Pre with the Konamicode so I haven't ever had to look this much into it. But I have a working laptop, it's just that my phone is my primary internet connection, so I need all the info and files I need before I get started, when I will constantly be rebooting my phone into different modes making my internet unusable.
 
And its not as easy as that. We can't just add root to the stock ota image file. It's a tar file so we could decompress it to access the files but then we're left with boot.IMG and recovery.img and so on and you can't just root something like that. It's need to be a custom rom and we need custom recovery to flash it. Or at least root and flash fire app
 
So just building a kernel when we have both sources it's just a matter of throwing some commands using the Android SDK and waiting then we have a kernel we can flash that will allow us to get root, then we can pull the recovery and build twrp/cwm for it opening up everything
 
But in the end only people that'll be doing unusual steps is the ones flashing and pulling files so we can have flashable files ready for everyone to download and enjoy. Probably just twrp and the rest you could do from it
 
paragontrix said:
And its not as easy as that. We can't just add root to the stock ota image file. It's a tar file so we could decompress it to access the files but then we're left with boot.IMG and recovery.img and so on and you can't just root something like that. It's need to be a custom rom and we need custom recovery to flash it. Or at least root and flash fire app
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It's possible I know that, it's just not as common on phones and tablets, manually adding the su binary is the common way to root on x86(PC) Android so i know it can be done, basically just mounting the IMG as a file system adding the binary and fixing permissions and just flashing it back.
 
I understand that but this is Android not windows. You can manually add super user (which is Linux btw I'm not sure where windows comes into play) info system/priv-apps or something like that, give it proper permissions, manually add the SU binary, than reboot. You can't access those system folders without the image having been installed and partitioned out
 
I've never tried that before cause it's more work than its worth compared to the other options we possibly have. I feel there would be definite issues trying to flash it after having to compress everything back together yourself. I could be wrong though lol
 
paragontrix said:
I understand that but this is Android not windows. You can manually add super user (which is Linux btw I'm not sure where windows comes into play) info system/priv-apps or something like that, give it proper permissions, manually add the SU binary, than reboot. You can't access those system folders without the image having been installed and partitioned out
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Didn't say Windows, said x86 Android the version people can install on intel pcs
 
paragontrix said:
Hey all the posts about tethering got removed they were flooding out our work on getting this rooted, would you kindly go to the tethering thread to discuss that and if you have anything root related to talk about feel free to put it here
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I didnt see the the pages after that, I only replied from within alert.
 
jaykoerner said:
Didn't say Windows, said x86 Android the version people can install on intel pcs
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There are apps to mount IMG as drives and you can edit the files from there, not sure it's been since KitKat that I've done this but this definitely was a thing since there is no recovery for x86 Android
 
Ahhhhh oops my bad I'm tired and misread that I'm sorry. You would be correct in that it's possible, and Im sure it works great on the PC install of Android and with it being KitKat too there's allot that's different about this situation. Like how the bootloader sees the modified file and stuff, right here is the closest anyone's come to rooting this phone so in all reality we don't know what could work and what couldn't
 
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