Gadgetory

some of the cooler things that we talked about on Pocket now at least Android related stuff requires that you have root permissions on your Android powered phone or tablet that's not terribly difficult but it does require that you unlock your bootloader or does it today I want to show you a way that you can route your Galaxy Nexus without unlocking your bootloader it's not for that faint of heart but hopefully it won't be too bad for you let's go take a look first of all let's throw out some credit this is based on an article that was posted on xda-developers by e Frant who gives credit to binary bi n4r why that's liek for binary I think basically what they've done is they put together an ADB restore that kind of is an exploit and kind of does some cool stuff so what you're gonna need of course is a computer because this involves ADB and some commands you're gonna need your Galaxy Nexus you're going to need a USB cable micro USB plug into your computer you're gonna need some patience you're gonna need the Android SDK so yeah that's that's the main stuff let's get to it next thing you're gonna do is download some files or one file on a zip from the XDA post I'll have a link to that over at pocketnow.com you're going to put that somewhere easily accessible then you're gonna come over to your Android powered device your Galaxy Nexus in this case we're gonna open up developer options that's in settings we're gonna turn those on yes we know we want to do that and we are going to enable USB debugging just like that say yes again that's gonna let us use adb that Android debugging bridge to do some of this stuff next we're gonna push some files over step number four we want to get this fake backup started so we're gonna paste that in again adb is our friend here we're gonna run the restore command and pass to it the fake backup a b which is this file right here but we don't want to hit restore on our device we just want to enter this and then press the return key to make sure that's correct just enter the command in the command prompt on your PC press Enter okay command entered and enter there we go now I look down here on my Nexus you'll notice I've got this full restore prompt I do not want to hit restore my data at this point I want to leave it right here very important step so the next thing step 5 is we're going to run an ADB shell command with a nice while loop inside it and that is going to look just like this now essentially what we're doing here is we're running the exploit while that's running we want to hit restore on on our on our device on our Galaxy Nexus so let's go ahead hit enter it's running now let's it restore restore is starting once it's finished which it looks like it is then I want to reboot my device so it's all done at that point all right to do this I want to do an ADB reboot so again I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste just to make this easy and once I've done that my device turns off it comes up and you'll notice I do not have an unlock down here ok so it's still just regular bootloader locked all that fun stuff I still have some time to go so all kinds of fun once it's rebooted I'll by the way when this reboots it's gonna be running in in debug mode that are in emulator mode rather so it's gonna be really laggy the screens gonna flicker don't worry about that that's normal we just want to get to adb shell once it's booted back up I have a black screen on my device I don't know if that's what I'm supposed to have or not but I'm gonna go ahead and try and invoke this adb shell see what I get I do have access to the device even though I don't have anything on the screen in fact it's an octave thort some people call that the hash key or the pound symbol it's the octothorpe you can look it up now that's a good thing because once I've completed step eight my prompt should be an octave Thorpe and not a dollar sign if it's a dollar sign it didn't work go back to step four try again okay now what we want to do is Mount our system partition as readwrite and that again we're going to just copy and paste here we're gonna mount - Oh space remount comma our W space - T our type is going to be ext4 and this is what we're going to mount so we'll go ahead and enter on that we're all mounted next thing we're gonna copy su over to our system folder just like that next we are gonna change permissions on that to zero six seven five five just like that we're up to step twelve if you're following along at this point we're going to set up a symbolic link to su or rather symbolically link su to X bin slash su and that's not how you do it you right click and hit paste by the way guys okay so symbolically created next we're going to copy our super user apk over to our system folder so that's now done let's try and change mod this guy so that we can do what we need to with it this time that worked just fine next if you're following along we're on step 15 we're going to delete the file that our exploit created which is a file called local dot prop in our data folder again copy and paste that from our article and there we go next up step 16 we are going to exit this now you may need to exit twice sometimes you have to exit out of your super user and then exit back but in this case I just had to do just one so that's good step 16 complete step 17 is we need to type the following it might not be necessary on the Galaxy Nexus but it is on other phones that use this so we're gonna go ahead and do it anyway this is simply an ATV shelled to sink sink sink and there we go it has sunk sunk sunk next up we're going to reboot again and I hope this will take us out of emulator mode step 19 now says done you should now have root without having to unlock your bootloader if you want to unlock now you can without wiping anything so in this post again that will have linked at pocketnow.com there is a link to a bootloader unlocker that you can use once you've gone through this whole exploit and essentially it's just gonna unlock your phone without doing a wipe if you do that the regular OAM unlock that'll unlock your bootloader but it it's also gonna wipe everything you can relock it it's also going to wipe everything so if you don't want to do that then you can go ahead and install this and then go through all of the process so all kinds of fun now if we didn't have root access after doing all of that we have another step we can do so let's go ahead and fire up our device here and see what we have shall we now probably the easiest way to see if we have root is to launch up an Android terminal window so that's what I've done here you can download any one of dozens of terminal apps from the market or the the Play Store I'm an old school guy that way so now what you'll see is I'm at a dollar sign prompt and if you remember when we talked about that it doesn't mean much so how can we come over here and find out if we've got super user access we type in su and we hit enter it sits and thinks and then hey look at this we've got a super user request let's allow that and now if you notice we have an octa thorpe symbol so yes indeed we do have super user we do have root access on our device so there we go we can now do all the cool stuff install all the cool apps without going through and om or unlocking the bootloader not really OEM unlocking but unlocking the bootloader that's that's what we've been able to do here big long a hairy Wow all kinds of craziness we didn't have to use step 10 B in this process which changes the owner of super user luckily yay so if we did we'd have to go back and do steps 10 through 19 again but that shows us we can do it we're done we can now enjoy route and super user and all kinds of stuff and we haven't had to wipe or unlock or anything like that whoo all right for the full instructions head over to pocketnow.com we're gonna give you the the brief rundown there we're also gonna link over to the article at xda-developers comm which is where we were copying and pasting everything from that's where the files are gonna be for you to download and copy over onto the device using ADB so you can run through the exploits and whatnot did you like what you see if so please give us a big thumbs up it's always kind of scary to go through and do all kinds of untested stuff at least untested by us on our devices but we do it so you don't have to be as scared or as worried about it if you like us doing that and yeah big thumbs up right there for potentially breaking my device but I didn't yay if you have any questions or comments head over to pocketnow.com it and leave a comment for us the link to the article is gonna be right down there if you're watching this on YouTube of course if you're watching this video on pocket now you're probably already there so you can just leave a comment down below we like having all of the conversations over there so everybody's all in one place not scattered between PocketNow and YouTube and who knows where else you could be thanks very much for watching for pocket now I'm Joe Levi