Rooted BIONIC warranty replacement procedure?

[WebOS Refugee]

Verizon is replacing my certified pre-owned BIONIC under warranty for an earpiece speaker issue.

After hanging up with Verizon, I downloaded the free edition of Titanium Backup from the Market to back everything up to the micro-SD card. It required root access to do that, so I used Dan Rosenberg's recently-release root exploit to root the phone, then went back and let TB do its thing. Two questions for the experts here:

(1) Is everything I need now in fact stored locally? When the new phone arrives, my instructions are to shut down the current phone, move the SIM and micro-SD cards from old to new, then boot the new phone. At that point, do I:

• continue without missing a step because the SIM and micro-SD are my entire environment, or
• restore some or all of the current filesystem from Titanium Backup, or
• let Verizon's Backup Assistant restore the few contacts that are actually on the phone instead of on the Exchange server (and no, to answer the obvious question, Gmail is empty; I created an account when activating the phone a couple of weeks ago, but it doesn't synchronize anything), or
• take some other action(s)?

(2) My current understanding is that the SIM and micro-SD compose the entire storage subsystem of the phone, so its current rooted state is not, e.g., recorded on a PROM somewhere. A phone with neither of those cards aboard will, therefore, not be in any condition to which Verizon (or Motorola, for that matter) would object. Is that accurate?

 

[soulsurvives]

Bullet one....no....the sim on Verizon does not hold information like a sim from att as Verizon is cdma however the phone will work and you won't have to do anything to activate... just won't move any contacts....
Bullet two.....if you want to restore anything with tb you will have to root the new phone...
Bullet there....is an option...
Bullet four....I back my contacts up on my sd card for this reason....
Question two....this is incorrect....the sim card does not store any information....just associates the phone with phone with your account and contains the 4G radio (I believe).....the sd card will store things such as pics and downloads and music.. pretty much what ever you want to place on it....however I think the default storage location for most things on the bionic is the internal storage card....in the settings and storage area you will see two sd cards...one says sd the other sd-ext... the sd-ext is the one you take out the other is internal....I have had move many items from the internal to the external card.....as far as root...that all stays on the phone til you unroot the phone.... the only way to remove root is by reprogramming the phone ....a factory data reset will not even do it....and yes if Verizon finds out that the phone is rooted they will void the warranty and charge you full price for the replacement...don't know if anyone has ever been caught tho......
If I have been incorrect on any of this I'm sure some of the smart folks on here will correct me.....

 

[Bionic Bobsled]

as far as root...that all stays on the phone til you unroot the phone.... the only way to remove root is by reprogramming the phone ....a factory data reset will not even do it....and yes if Verizon finds out that the phone is rooted they will void the warranty and charge you full price for the replacement...don't know if anyone has ever been caught tho......
If I have been incorrect on any of this I'm sure some of the smart folks on here will correct me.....

Good stuff.

Thanks.

 

[doogald]

Titanium Backup, as far as I know, stores its backups on internal storage of the Bionic, rather than on the external SD card, in a folder called /TitaniumBackup. If this is the case, you will need to copy that folder to either the external SD card, or to your computer, and then copy it back on the new phone. I'd also delete that folder - it's a good clue that you rooted the phone.

I have no idea if VZW or Moto actually looks to see if it was rooted, but the presence of the superuser app and busybox would be a dead giveaway that the phone was rooted.

Unless you backed up system data - if you only backed up user apps - Titanium will not restore things like SMS and MMS messages, call history, contacts, calendars, etc. Since you are switching among the same phone, those should be safe to restore if you did back up user data + system apps, but I'm not sure what you backed up with Titanium.

 

[WebOS Refugee]

Thanks, all. To your various questions:

• The default backup for TB picked up both system and user files, although I should probably run it again just before taking the original phone offline.
• Thanks for the info on the internal storage. Sounds like I'll have to clean that up. The root exploit that I used doesn't have an associated unroot script, so I might have to try the OneClick approach to which the sticky post at the top of the forum refers. My *nix experience dates from System V, so I am definitely a script kiddie in this environment until I catch up a bit . I can read the script, though, so looking for specific files and ensuring that they are gone should be doable.
• Yes, the Files app allowed me to see the TitaniumBackup directory on the internal storage and copy it to the external SD. I don't know whether TB will be able to find it there and restore from it or whether I'll have to copy it back first.
• All told, a bit more complex than what the support guy told me on the phone last night. It's what I get for trying to emulate the old Palm environment, in which BackupBuddy really would restore your phone in its entirety. I just have too little actual knowledge of this platform at the moment. Ah, well, I'll learn a bit.

Thanks again for your help!

 

[soulsurvives]

Thanks, all. To your various questions:

• The default backup for TB picked up both system and user files, although I should probably run it again just before taking the original phone offline.
• Thanks for the info on the internal storage. Sounds like I'll have to clean that up. The root exploit that I used doesn't have an associated unroot script, so I might have to try the OneClick approach to which the sticky post at the top of the forum refers. My *nix experience dates from System V, so I am definitely a script kiddie in this environment until I catch up a bit . I can read the script, though, so looking for specific files and ensuring that they are gone should be doable.
• Yes, the Files app allowed me to see the TitaniumBackup directory on the internal storage and copy it to the external SD. I don't know whether TB will be able to find it there and restore from it or whether I'll have to copy it back first.
• All told, a bit more complex than what the support guy told me on the phone last night. It's what I get for trying to emulate the old Palm environment, in which BackupBuddy really would restore your phone in its entirety. I just have too little actual knowledge of this platform at the moment. Ah, well, I'll learn a bit.

Thanks again for your help!

....open titanium backup....hit the menu button (button on the bottom left with 4 squares with one being solid)....then select preferences.....then scroll down and select backup folder location....then you can change the default storage location from sd to sd-ext....that way you don't have to move anything around anymore.....

 

[rosser]

Im pretty sure that Verizon is gonna check and see if it's rooted. Especially since the phone is actually functional.


Sent from my thumbs to your retinas

 

[WebOS Refugee]

Success. Here are the steps that I took:

• Ran Titanium Backup (unfortunately, I forgot to reset backup location, so I had to use Files to copy the backup files from internal to external SD, then delete the internal TB directory).
• Crossed my fingers and ran Pete's one-click to unroot (answered "no" to the question about DROID 3 restoration of system partition). NB: This verifies that Pete's can be used to unroot 5.9.902 that has been rooted with Dan Rosenberg's motofail exploit.
• Tried to run TB again, verified that it could not gain root access, so unrooting appeared to be complete.
• Ran adb shell session to verify that items pushed by Dan's script were absent.
• Ran Verizon Backup Assistant one last time to capture contacts (not that there are that many of them on the phone; they're mostly in Exchange).
• Swapped SIM, micro-SD and battery to the replacement phone, which came up running 5.5.893.
• Went through the activation procedure, tested sound quality in the earpiece: OK. Getting this fixed was the point of the exercise -- everything else is me trying to ensure that my stuff gets from the old phone to the new one intact.
• TB was not installed on the new phone. I went to the Market to download it; as soon as I agreed to the initial terms, a bunch of other updates came down with it, but by no means my entire app suite.
• Settings / Applications / Development: checked the box to enable USB debugging.
• Connected the USB cord, selected charge-only mode, verified that ADB Interface showed up in Device Manager on my XP system.
• Tried using Pete's to re-root. It failed on step 3:
  
  
  Running exploit step 3 of 3 (adding su, busybox, and superuser.apk)... FAIL!
  
  ERROR: adb could not be granted root access via local.prop method
  
  Try again from the start, but if the problem continues, check your version
  of Gingerbread -- hopefully you don't have a version where this exploit
  was fixed.
  ​
• Retried Pete's -- still failed.
• Figured I might as well update to .902, since that would kill root in any event, and I wasn't sure whether I wanted TB to try to restore system files to an older version. Accepted the OTA update to 5.9.902.
• Retried Pete's, which I don't believe works on this version, and yes, it failed.
• The motofail exploit successfully rooted this phone, as it had done for its predecessor.
• Ran TB, selected the option to restore missing apps and all system data. I had to manually approve a bunch of apps, but the batch run completed okay. The wallpaper was still showing the default circuit, but there was also a notification bar saying that a reboot was recommended.
• After rebooting, the wallpaper was correct, and Contacts, E-mail accounts and App Groups were OK. I did notice a few small issues:
  • GMail was set to sync everything.
  • The security access code was not set up.
  • Widgets were gone from all home screens and had to be set up again.
  • The weather widget lost all of its cities.
  • PocketBible (a pre-release version, sideloaded) needed to re-download all translations that I own, but worked fine once that was done.

All in all, a successful migration from old phone to new. The nice folks at 611 assured me that all phones that come back are wiped before testing, so I didn't bother to take it to the Verizon store to get that done. The old phone is in the box and ready for a run to the FedEx store tomorrow.

Many thanks to you all for your help!

 

[doogald]

[*] Ran TB, selected the option to restore missing apps and all system data. I had to manually approve a bunch of apps, but the batch run completed okay.

The paid version of Titanium allows batch restore without having to say yes to each restore. It's worth it if you flash ROMs often, etc., plus it's a way to get $$$ into the pockets of the developer, which helps make the app better.

[*] Widgets were gone from all home screens and had to be set up again.

This is due to an issue in Android - widgets cannot be restored. If you had a third-party launcher, such as Launcher Pro, that has its own backup and restore procedures, you will see the same issue - screens and settings will restore, but widgets will not.

 

[WebOS Refugee]

The paid version of Titanium ... a way to get $$$ into the pockets of the developer, which helps make the app better.

Yep. Soon. Gotta poke around for a bit to gain some measure of clue about what I'm doing first, then I'll buy tools that advance me in the desired direction.

in Android - widgets cannot be restored.

Good info. Thanks!