A couple of days back, we brought you a universal rooting method for Gingerbread-based Samsung smartphones, courtesy of the hardworking folk of XDA developers. Today, we present you a similar discovery, this time for Motorola devices running the Big G’s older smartphone software.
The method, naturally, comes straight from XDA once again via member rodrigojfuentes, who has offered a simple method which should effortlessly root all Motorola phones currently running Gingerbread. One snag, however, is that you’ll need to be running a Linux machine, although Windows and Mac users can simply load Linux virtual machine. It is, unfortunately, a bit of hassle, but once the device has been rooted, you can continue with your normal OS and configuration.
Besides, a couple of basic commands and alterations later – as detailed in the step-by-step tutorial below – will have you on your way. We strongly recommend you adhere to the steps religiously and refrain from cutting corners – we don’t want to mess anything up.
DISCLAIMER: As usual, proceed with caution and at your own risk. Although the chances of something going wrong are minimal, Redmond Pie is not to be held responsible for any loss of data or the damage of your device as a result of you following this tutorial.
Step 1: Presuming your device is running unrooted Gingerbread, you’ll need to ask for a rooted gingerbread userdata partition image (aka CG37), with a modified local.prop file and USB Debugging enabled.
Step 2: Next, you’ll need to alter the value of ro.sys.atvc_allow_all_adb from 0 to 1.
Step 3: Then, create a userdata partition image by typing the following in the shell (with root access)
dd if=/dev/block/userdata of=/sdcard/CG37.smg
or
busybox dd if=/dev/block/userdata of=/sdcard/CG37.smg
Step 4: Once your CG37.smg is on the SD card, you’ll need to boot into linux
Step 5: In Linux, you’ll need to extract the contents of the folder found in this .zip, after which, you should also copy CG37.smg and your original, non-rooted SBF into that same folder.
Step 6: Start terminal (with root permissions), and type in:
cd <folder>
(instead of <folder>, write the location of the folder we made in Step 5)
Step 7: Resize that partition to 200 Mb, by typing the following:
efsck -f CG37.smg
resize2fs CG37.smg 200M
Then, type
chmod +x sbf_flash
Step 8: Start your Motorola phone into bootloader and connect it to your PC before typing:
./sbf_flash -r –userdata CG37.smg ORIGINAL.sbf
(change "ORIGINAL" with the name of your SBF)
Step 9: Once the device has booted up, type:
bash finishroot.sh
And that’s it. If you followed all of the steps correctly, your Motorola smartphone should be rooted on Gingerbread!
If you find yourself in any difficulty along the way, please check out the original thread over at XDA here.
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