Help on rooting iBall iTab Movies Pro (iBall IT-KSA0012)
Help on rooting iBall iTab Movies Pro (iBall IT-KSA0012)
(08-11-2021, 06:35 PM)VD-FLASH Hello community.
I wanted to root my iBall tablet powered by Unisoc SC9863a chipset and running Android 9. I followed the tutorial on this site and successfully unlocked the bootloader using modified fastboot. When it came to rooting, I did the following:
1. I created a custom vbmeta image and successfully flashed it on the tablet using fastboot
2. I grabbed the stock recovery from the PAC file of the stock firmware and patched it with magisk.
3. I signed the patched file using avbtool and public key.
4. I successfully flashed it on my device
This is where the problem starts. As mentioned here in https://www.hovatek.com/forum/thread-32678.html , after flashing the magisk patched recovery image, I powered down the phone. Next, I used volume up and power buttons to boot into recovery; and as the tutorial said, it booted into home screen instead of recovery. But I didn't get root! I tried patching the recovery with both normal and canary versions of magisk but both failed. I tried booting into recovery using both volume up and power and volume down and power but nothing happened. I didn't get root. When the device booted up to home screen, I once tried getting into recovery mode and it boot looped after showing iBall logo. It didn't boot into recovery at all.
Any solutions to it?
(10-11-2021, 01:42 PM)hovatek Have you tried patched boot.img to boot partition instead? You of course have to create a custom vbmeta for this
(11-11-2021, 03:57 PM)VD-FLASH Last night, I tried that too. But while flashing it, fastboot gives error that the size of boot image is larger than the size of boot partition.
(13-11-2021, 01:33 PM)hovatek unpack and repack the boot image using android image kitchen before signing
(27-11-2021, 01:18 PM)VD-FLASH I tried that too but it's of no use. I patched the stock boot image using magisk manager. Then I used Android image kitchen to unpack and repack the image. It gave me a 16MB image. I used avbtool and your instructions to sign the image. But while flashing it, it again gave me the same error that the size of partition is smaller than the size of the image. Any help on this?
(29-11-2021, 09:06 AM)hovatek What's the size of boot.img in your firmware?
(29-11-2021, 10:35 AM)VD-FLASH Both original boot image and magisk patched boot image have the same size of 36MB. But when you've mentioned about the size, I did notice a little change between the original and magisk patched boot image. The original boot image had about 16MB of data and the rest was the hash footer consisting of 0s. But the magisk patched boot image had got 17MB of data and the rest is hash footer with 0s. Could this be the reason? There's one more thing. First I tried rooting with stock recovery which gave me boot loop every time I booted into the recovery. So I switched to rooting with boot.img. While I unpack the stock boot image, it says there's no ramdisk in it. Now here's the main problem. My boot image doesn't have a ramdisk. My recovery has it but after patching with magisk, it gives boot loop. Any fix to this issue?
(30-11-2021, 08:10 AM)hovatek This means you'll be rooting with recovery.
I think the bootloop (when rooting with recovery) happens because you first booted to home screen before attempting to boot into recovery mode.
recovery-from-boot.p would have swapped out what you flashed with stock recovery, hence the boot loop.
After flashing patched recovery, you must power off then boot into recovery mode from off state.
Phone will boot up normally but you will have root
Refer to https://www.hovatek.com/forum/thread-32663.html
(03-12-2021, 12:19 PM)VD-FLASH I tried this method as well. As you said, I flashed magisk patched recovery and turned off the phone using SPD research tool. Then I tried to boot into recovery by using volume up + power button. As you said, instead of booting into recovery, it booted normally into home screen. But when I checked the root status, it said no root. I tried it several times with both volume up and down + power combination. But nothing worked. My tab did boot into home screen instead of recovery but it didn't give me root. Any help on this?