I have had a few requests for details on how I rooted the Gobii IVP android phone from Kalahari.
DISCLAIMER - I will not be held responsible for:
1. Voiding your Warranty.
2. Bricking your phone.
That said, here goes.
Background
Just to help some of our less techy forum members understand what we are trying to accomplish.
Simply put, rooting involves placing or rather "replacing" a file on the phone that allows you, the user, to access parts of the file system usually marked as restricted.
For the more techy guys, it allows us to run programs with elevated privileges.
This file named "su" ("super user") is either not present or flagged as usable only be the "root" user (that's where the term "rooting" comes from), hence us not being able to use it.
Since the early days of Android 2.x certain vulnerabilities have existed that allow this file to be uploaded quite easily using "rooting" tools such as "Super one click"
This tool would locate the vulnerabilities and exploit them to load the "su" file. As each new version of Andoid came out these vulnerabilities would be patched and it has become harder to root phones.
WARNING - There is a tool that will root this phone called Kingo. Don't be tempted to use it as it gathers personal information from your phone and posts it to a server in China.
This information includes your phone's IMEI number.
To continue, the Gobii phones use a MediaTek chip which has a very useful set of Windows based software tools, namely "SP Flash Tool", "MtkDroidTools" and "MTK_Rom_Studio". We will be using the first two to root the phone.
Basically the process involves replacing the "Recovery" partition with a modified version of our own partition.
We are going to dump our own recovery partition to the PC, modify it and flash it back to the phone.
The MediaTek phones have a partition called a "pre-loader". When the phone is switched off and a USB cable connected to your PC is plugged into the phone, the "pre-loader" partition is activated and waits for a command from the PC. If it doesn't see anything from the PC after a few seconds it shuts down and the charge cycle begins.
The SP Flash Tool is the software that will communicate with the phone to dump the Recovery section of the ROM to the PC and allow us to flash the modified version back to the phone.
Next post to follow
DISCLAIMER - I will not be held responsible for:
1. Voiding your Warranty.
2. Bricking your phone.
That said, here goes.
Background
Just to help some of our less techy forum members understand what we are trying to accomplish.
Simply put, rooting involves placing or rather "replacing" a file on the phone that allows you, the user, to access parts of the file system usually marked as restricted.
For the more techy guys, it allows us to run programs with elevated privileges.
This file named "su" ("super user") is either not present or flagged as usable only be the "root" user (that's where the term "rooting" comes from), hence us not being able to use it.
Since the early days of Android 2.x certain vulnerabilities have existed that allow this file to be uploaded quite easily using "rooting" tools such as "Super one click"
This tool would locate the vulnerabilities and exploit them to load the "su" file. As each new version of Andoid came out these vulnerabilities would be patched and it has become harder to root phones.
WARNING - There is a tool that will root this phone called Kingo. Don't be tempted to use it as it gathers personal information from your phone and posts it to a server in China.
This information includes your phone's IMEI number.
To continue, the Gobii phones use a MediaTek chip which has a very useful set of Windows based software tools, namely "SP Flash Tool", "MtkDroidTools" and "MTK_Rom_Studio". We will be using the first two to root the phone.
Basically the process involves replacing the "Recovery" partition with a modified version of our own partition.
We are going to dump our own recovery partition to the PC, modify it and flash it back to the phone.
The MediaTek phones have a partition called a "pre-loader". When the phone is switched off and a USB cable connected to your PC is plugged into the phone, the "pre-loader" partition is activated and waits for a command from the PC. If it doesn't see anything from the PC after a few seconds it shuts down and the charge cycle begins.
The SP Flash Tool is the software that will communicate with the phone to dump the Recovery section of the ROM to the PC and allow us to flash the modified version back to the phone.
Next post to follow
