Restored my phone and it's still rooted?

[dorlow]

So, I just bought a new Cricket HTC Desire 610 phone. I rooted it. Everything was working OK when I first rooted it. But then I started moving apps to the SD card and then apps broke and I couldn't fix them. Chrome was messed up and a few other essential apps. I couldn't install anything, gettin weird errors. So, I decided to go into the reset screen and reset my phone to defaults. When I rooted it, I first had to unlock the bootloader (which defaulted the phone.) Then I used King Root to root it via USB. I was assuming when I defaulted the phone, it would've left the boot loader unlocked but unrooted the phone. After the default happened, it downloaded all my old apps and one was to check if root was present. I ran it and pleasantly suprised to find the phone is still rooted.

It's now working a lot better. My internal storage has considerably more free space than before the reset. Everything is working great. I'm just curious why resetting the phone didn't unroot it.

 

[scary alien]

Hey @dorlow .

If you just did a factory reset, that would not have removed root for you since the root binaries (su binary and Super*.apk app) get installed in the /system partition, which is not touched by the reset.

I don't have the HTC Desire 610 or use King Root, but I'm pretty sure that what I said above holds true.

Cheers!

 

[ironagedave]

as far as I can see from what I have read if it is rooted - and there is no unroot supported with the method you use then it is rooted permanently and therefore not reversible. As scary alien indicates a restore factory settings is basically a reinstallation of the partition because the assumption is the system side of things (should in theory be untouched) so there would be little need to do a restoration there.

 

[Hadron]

It's reversible if you reflash the software completely, which for HTC means using an RUU (ROM Update Utility). That will completely overwrite the phone software including any mods you have made, no matter what those are.

However, you have to find the right RUU for your phone: same model, firmware no older than the current, and the "cidnum" must match (basically right region/carrier). So whether this is possible depends on whether a suitable RUU has been leaked or not.

As Scary says, a factory reset just wipes the /data partition, i.e. user apps and app data, but doesn't touch the /system partition. Therefore a factory reset will never unroot a phone (nor will it restore deleted system apps or undo any other system modifications). It's a common misconception that a factory reset returns the phone to factory state: it's called a factory reset because if you've not modified the system erasing user-installed content returns it to the factory state, but that's all it does.