Saturday, August 04, 2012

How to enable root prompts on your H24 TV Box a.k.a Mini X Plus

EDIT: Sorry this helps only in enabling the root prompts and not root the device.. Thanks Sacha for helping me realize..

Just got this Allwinner A10 (Cortex A8) based android device and already having some fun.

The device comes with a USB OTG. But unfortunately we do not have a cable for this device as you need a male to male USB cable (checking on this, not sure if it will work). The only way left to connect to the device is wifi. I performed the following steps:

DISCLAIMER: You and only you are responsible for any consequences of doing below steps. I am not responsible if below steps melt your device, explode, disintegrate, etc. This may void your device warranty or make your device unusable. You've been warned!

1.       Enable Wifi. Connect to a Wifi access point
2.       Add a Google account and enable Play Market.
3.       Install Wifi over adb
4.       Install Busybox installer
5.       Install Superuser
6.       Start the app wifi over adb
7.       Click the Turn on Button. This will show you the IP and the port. We need this for the next step.
8.       On your desktop/laptop, Open a cmd prompt: 
adb connect 192.168.100.5.
You will get a message connected to 192.168.100.5:5555
adb shell
root@android:/ #
9.       The # prompt. This means it is already rooted. However, there is not superuser app installed. And the apps requiring root don’t work as expected yet.
10.   I went ahead and downloaded the Superuser app and installed it. Still the root prompts didn’t not appear. So, the next step was to replace the /system.xbin/su
11.   Download  Superuser-3.1.3-arm-signed.zip from  http://androidsu.com/superuser/  which have the relevant files (su). Extract them in  handy location. Simply put them wherever adb.exe is present.
12.   Continuing the adb shell
adb remount
adb shell
#mv /system/xbin/su /system/xbin/su.old
#exit
adb push su /system/xbin/su
adb shell chown 0.0 /system/xbin/su
adb shell chmod 06755 /system/xbin/su
adb reboot
13.    The Device must be rooted now.
14.   Do not turn the automatically alow root access option in superuser app. This caused me problems. Leave it at Prompt

The next articles will be on
2. How to recover your device/reflash the firmware

7 comments:

Sacha said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sacha said...

I'm stuck at step 7.

Can't turn on the WiFi ADB due to the error message: "This app requires rooted phone and superuser permission" ... Oh the irony... pls help

Ravindran K said...

Sorry the title is a little misleading...my device was prerooted but there superuser.apk was missing...just installing the latest one will enable those root prompts...and you can click allow.. hoping you have a pre-rooted version but without the superuser.apk..

if it is not rooted, we might need to use tools like superoneclick root... sorry havent tried it.. but basically it uses some exploits to get root access over adb and copied the correct su and superuser.apk files...

hope this helps..

Sacha said...

thx for your answer!

Though 'Bosybox Installer' (icon is a green colored tranparant cube) sais 'Your device is rooted' , 'Using Busybox version 1.18.13', so I assume my 'H24 TV Box a.k.a Mini X Plus', the latest 1gb ram version, is rooted, though not properly.
When trying to upgrade BusyBox to a newer version , I keep getting 'Installing failed' message, without more info... :(

Oneclick root etc needs a usb connection, so will need to buy a male-to-male usb cable first, since the minix doesn't have a regular micro usb connection for adb...

Randy King said...

I get the same error. Pretty much any program I have tried that requires root says that I do not have root and aborts, including all the adb over wifi enablers

Randy King said...

I get the same error.

Randy King said...

I can confirm that the instructions posted here:

http://minixandroid.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/root-minix-plus/#comments

Actually root the mini xplus as shipped.