Saturday, May 12, 2012

Galaxy Nexus (CDMA)

Well after several months of putting up with my rebooting (sometimes looping) when I used any substantial amount of 3G data, I decided to upgrade. I was looking at the HTC Rezound and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, and found this really good comparison article on phoneArena. Ultimately, after many recommendations by friends, I went with the Nexus.

It arrived, running Android 4.0.2.  This time, I lasted about 2 days before rooting it.  Everybody has their own half-assed write ups of this, but I wanted to mainly include my sources for some of these files:



ADB / Fastboot Drivers
I downloaded the USB drivers directly from Samsung's site on their SCH-I515 download page. It's a 23MB download which is a bit ridiculous, but I wan unable to isolate exactly which driver was required from the compressed exe.

After installing them, I was able to plug in my phone, turn on USB debugging, execute "adb devices" and see my device.  Next, I rebooted into fastboot mode (hold all three buttons to turn it on). At this point, the device showed up as "Android 1.0".  However, I was able to fix that by:










Then, there should be just one "SAMSUNG Android ADB Interface" listed.

After correcting the driver issue, I was able to execute "fastboot devices" and see my device.

Unlock Bootloader
Next step is "fastboot oem unlock" !


After unlocking, I rebooted, and the Google screen now has an unlocked icon!


ClockworkMod Recovery
After making sure the phone booted OK, I flashed the latest (touch) version of CWM from the ClockworkMod ROM Manager page.  At this time, that version was recovery-clockwork-touch-5.8.0.2-toro.img.  Simply download and "fastboot flash recovery recovery-clockwork-touch-5.8.0.2-toro.img".

ROOT
Next, I rebooted, and went through the initial setup.  Now it's time to actually get root!  The page that I had been following included some version of SuperSU. I didn't really want to just use what they gave me, and went on the hunt for the latest su.

Note for root newbies: "Root" essentially means having access to the su ("superuser") binary, which allows a process to run as the root user.  On android, "root" is two components: The su binary (linux executable), and Superuser.apk, which is the accompanying Android app, which manages requests for root, logs, etc.

It  appears that androidsu.com is the true "home" of superuser for Android. So I downloaded the latest, Superuser-3.0.7-efghi-signed.zip, and used "adb push ....zip /sdcard/" to push it to my phone.

Then I rebooted into recovery again ("adb reboot recovery"), and tried to install it, with the “Install zip from sdcard” option. However, I got the following: “E:Error in /sdcard/Superuser-3.0.7-efghi-signed.zip (Status 0)".  Doing a little research, I found the following posts:

I tried everything, but could not get it to install. Instead, I found myself on download.clockworkmod.com.  In /su/, I found seven different "-test" versions, and in /test/ there is one su.zip. (I can't for the life of me find the site that linked to that one.)  It turns out that that is the one that worked for me. I don't quite understand, but whatever, it successfully installed via CWM.  After rebooting, Superuser was installed, and showed the correct version of the binary (and updated it too!).

What's Next
Next, I'm probably going to upgrade to the stock Android 4.0.4 ROM, as it supposedly makes some big improvements.  That page links to this thread.  Also in my sights for a new ROM are this IMM76K 4.0.4 mod, and of course CyanogenMod 9, which is currently available only in nightlies.




Resources
http://galaxynexusroot.com/galaxy-nexus-root/how-to-root-galaxy-nexus-universal-guidegsmverizonsprintwindowslinuxmac/
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2 comments:

  1. UnknownMay 14, 2012 at 10:11 AM

    The Galaxy Nexus Toolkit is a pretty much one-stop-shop when it comes to rooting/flashing/doing anything to your Nexus. You can get it here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1614827

    Also, I'd recommend looking at Peter Alfonso's builds/ROMs. He builds them from source (AOSP), adds a few tweaks here and there but tries to keep the overall ROM as stock-looking as possible. They are very fast and stable - at one point my phone had clocked over 300 hours without a reboot. http://download.peteralfonso.com/toro/rom

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  2. UnknownJune 24, 2012 at 8:00 PM

    MAN! YOU'RE GOD!

    I tried different Superuser versions, tried multiple times, and nothing would work on my Motorola Atrix 4G. THANKS A LOT for this version you pointed out!

    This su.zip have a different directory structure from androidsu.com! That should be the problem.

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