Rooting the Galaxy S2, the odd man out

As the Nexus Rooting euphoria gradually faded away, I was left with my unrooted Samsung GS2. Looking for a way to Root this wonderful device required much Googling, and reading of XDA threads, as I searched for a Mac way to carry out this task. This proved to go unrewarded..

So often willing helpers would point to the simple PC way of carrying this out. "Use Wugfresh", "Get Odin", "Install Kies", etc., so, in the end I thought OK I'll give it a go, not knowing what frustrations this would stimulate!

At the time I had a tiny ASUS T91MT, which invariably started with an hour or so of Microsoft updates, before one could begin the slow process of installing Kies, a large package needed just for the drivers Odin requires. (Why can't someone simplify things and put up a link to the drivers?).

Anyway, all my thanks go to Jose Farrugia aka @wiredmash who offered the clearest instructions on Rooting the GS2, using the Siyah kernel, see the video and point by point instructions at http://www.wiredmash.com/how-to-root-samsung-galaxy-s2-i9100-jelly-bean-4-1-2/ ... :)

All went well with the above, but for one hitch. The Odin UI more than filled the vertical dimensions of the tiny T91MT, so I was unable to get at the Start button! I tried everything, including a lot of very bad language, until the solution came to mind - change the screen resolution! That gave me a 5x3 inch UI with a tiny Start button I could press, and a minute or so later all was done. Dead simple as the XDA guys said..

Rooting Mania

In 22nd February's post I covered updating to Yakju build on my SG Nexus. I did a LOT of reading on XDA Forums after that until, on March 1st (Susan's birthday) I was mentally prepared to risk turning it into a 'brick'..

A senior member of XDA, efrant, had produced the guide not only for the Yakju task, but also in a paragraph E: which I had overlooked, he spelt out the next step - Rooting the phone!

Well, after almost 2 years spent compiling Gentoo I know what Root is and does, but somehow the idea of 'bricking' your favourite mobile phone is a touch off-putting. Anyway, after becoming tired, confused, and mixing things up like a true n00b on XDA, I succeeded in rooting the Nexus quite late in the evening.

YES! :)   Now I could carry out the next steps - NANDroid backup, and Titanium Backup Pro (TB). Hallowed words of Android's inner sanctum..

TB turned out to have a non-intuitive GUI, particularly where backing up to Dropbox was concerned. The documentation did not clarify how this was done, so I emailed support. They came back with a pleasant description after ca. 24 hours, by which time I had Googled my way to the answer on XDA forums.

It turns out that slowly Uploading to Dropbox is not a good solution, but having a 200GB spare partition on the iMac is, and I found several ways to transfer backups there in the coming days, as I decided on backup schedules.

Then there was the ClamXav GingerBreak Trojan issue! This turned out to be a correct false alarm, as GingerBreak is used in the root process. Moving the iMac's Downloads folder and my work folders to the 200GB partition solved that problem.

To cut a long story short, I Rooted the Nexus 7 next, and after success with that sprinted on to Root the Nexus 10. The latter used a different ClockworkMod (CWM) Recovery file, which clearly wasn't backing up apps. This gave me the opportunity to try TWRP instead of CWM.

TWRP cut out most of the manual work with Fastboot, and was a joy to use compared to pressing Power & Volume buttons, which one has to do with CWM whenever one wants to run a NANDroid backup. It also puts the latter into the 'SDcard' where TB can 'Restore an app from NANDroid', my data test.

Over the next few days I found the following excellent Root applications:

1. DiskUsage. This gives a visual overview of the files system.
2. CWMR Touch Installer. Speeds up access to Recovery.
3. X-Plore. A dual-pane file explorer.
4. Solid Explorer. This is the perfect dual-pane explorer!
5. GooManager. This installs TWRP, very easily!
6. CPU Tuner. Gives you control over power consumption.
7. USB OTG Helper (root). An aid to using USB Mass storage.
8. System Tuner Pro. Monitors everything.
9. ES File Explorer. Gives access to NAS drives..
10. Battery Monitor Widget Pro.