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Help Problems unpacking, packing and installing custom boot.img on ZTE Compel Phone

T

treemark

Lurker
The ZTE Compel is a pretty good little phone for 50 bucks and I've selected it for a robotics project. I've spent the last week or so learning all about rooting and custom roms and have made progress, but I'm stuck on the final push to the device.

My steps so far.
  1. Rooted the phone with kingo
  2. extracted the boot.img file by using mount and dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0p7 of=/sdcard/boot.img
  3. unpacked the img file with abootimg
  4. unpacked the resulting ramdisk file with cpio and gzip
  5. changed default.prop so that ro.secure=0
  6. repacked the modified ramdisk with cpio and gzip
  7. recreated the boot.img with mkbootimg
At this point I've tried fastboot (can't see the phone from a mac book, got error ERROR: Unable to create a plug-in (e00002c7) sometimes.

I've tried signing a custom ROM update.zip with signapk.jar that just had the boot.img file in it. But the phone rejects it with E:2 footer[2]=0x85 footer[3]=0x00

And finally I tried copying the boot.img back to /dev/block/mmcblkop7 but in a sleep deprived fit, forgot and used cp instead of dd, bricking one of my two test phones.

Can anyone tell me if this last method has a chance of working or how I might proceed at this point?

Thanks,

Mark
 
Last edited:
Just a couple of random questions, Mark:

1. Your bootloader is unlocked, correct?

2. On the MacBook, have you tried using "sudo fastboot ..." for invoking fastboot? (I know I have to use sudo when running fastboot on my Linux PC to get it proper rights/privileges)

3. Are you using fastboot to flash the boot image to your boot partition?

I'm not at all familiar with your device, so I'm really just asking questions that might help others that are familiar help you out.
 
So I've had no luck at all with fastboot. I've tried rebooting with volume down and power, and I've tried adb reboot bootloader followed by fastboot devices and fastboot oem unlock to no effect. Sometimes my os x fastboot binary throws that error I mentioned above. I also fired up ubuntu on parallels and attempted fastboot from there as well with no luck. I did find several forum posts that claim all ZTE phones ship unlocked.

I did try all these with sudo.

As I can't get fastboot to work, do you think using dd to copy the img file back to the /dev/block/???? folder could work?

Presently, I've found a custom ROM for a different ZTE phone, and I'm trying to reverse engineer it's structure with images and files I've extracted from my phone.
 
Wow that must be one of the most un-nooby root questions I've ever read on here lol.
Good luck with the 'bot sir. I'm truly jealous of your knowledge.
And you're in perfect hands with Scary here
:thumbsupdroid:
 
Hey thanks funky, I am ajava developer with a unix background which helps but I must say, android truly is the wild west. I have found references in other forums to using dd to copy images back to /dev/block

http://android.stackexchange.com/qu...n-image-of-android-partition-from-my-linux-pc

If it does work, it would be a way to flash an android without unlocking it, the caveat being if you **** it up the first time you brick it.

If it inspires anyone to assist, here's what I'm putting this phone inside...

rvjet.jpg
 
The nice thing about an android phone is that it already has OS support and Java APIs for much of what I need. GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, wifi, 3g, 4g, video codecs, touch screen, etc. I wouldn't even need to root it if it supported usb 'on the go' host mode out of the box, but they've intentionally disabled the feature. I need usb host mode in order to access the servo controller, altimeter, wind speed indicator and of course a web cam in the nose.

If anybody out there knows of a cheap-ish phone that has usb host mode please let me know.
 
I'm not sure what USB host mode is tbh but check gsmarena.com for the specs of the Moto G (2013, 1st generation) should be pretty cheap used. Even the Moto E (1st gen)
 
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