How to unroot your EVO 4G
- July 28th, 2010
- Posted in Android . How To
- By zeiroe
- Write comment
So I had a co-worker that got an EVO 4G. Unfortunately he was still in a contract with the android hating carrier known as AT&T. He wanted to see what he was missing all the while taking advantage of the 30 day return policy. First thing he does once we get back to the office from the lunch time purchase was hand me the phone to root. All I could offer at the time was wireless tether but I couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to hack away at another phone that I never touched before. It was easy enough to root … Many have done so with the reflash app created by the awesome devs at unrevoked.com … If you’ve been to the site to download, you can see what 5 phones this rooting application applies to.
Needless to say, I had to unroot and bring his phone back to stock. Understandably, he couldn’t keep up with 3 lines on AT&T and his own line on Sprint. Searched as I may, I could not find a quick writeup on how to truly unroot (recovery partition and all) and bring back to stock. This is what drove me to write one up myself. If all you’ve done is ran the reflash app to gain root and change the recovery … then proceed with the following:
- Download the latest reflash untility from unrevoked.com
- Download the stock EVO recovery.img … The one I’m providing was extracted from the Supersonic_1.32.651.1_Radio_1.39.00.04.26_release_171253 RUU.
- Boot your phone into the recovery console and connect it to your computer.
- Mount the system partition
- adb shell
- rm /system/bin/su
- rm /system/app/Superuser.apk
- unmount the system partition, unplug your phone and reboot your phone back into the full OS.
- Start the reflash utility but make sure your phone is not plugged in. It should give a status that its waiting for your device to be plugged in.
- Click on File and Custom Recovery. Point it to the recovery.img file that I liked earlier.
- The bottom of the window should change from Clockwork Recovery to Custom.
- Now plug your phone in and let reflash do its magic. Once its completed, congrats.
You will still need to manually uninstall your applications that take advantage of root like wifi tether or root explorer.
Just cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
Sent from my iPhone 4G
… iPhone 4g huh …
Is there any way you could break this down further into noob terms?
I don’t know how to mount partitions. I don’t know what adb shell is…etc.
Now, I can work my way around a computer just fine, I’m not totally illiterate, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to root my phone. However, I need a lot of help doing it. I followed this guide: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=701004
Still, I loved how detailed this thread was. I don’t really need images, but more detailed text on how to follow through with each step would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks for taking the time to write this up. After getting a cracked Froyo on my phone, I can’t load up gmail OR my app store. Gotta get my phone back to its stock condition so I could get HTC’s new froyo update.
Hey Moose … If you’ve already loaded a custom rom and changed the system partition, the unroot process is a bit longer. Let me see if I can write something up for you.
Yeah, basically what I’ve done was follow the steps in the tutorial I posted in that link. After I got the root working, etc., I had no problems. I was able to tether, access the market, use gmail, etc.
A friend shared a hacked froyo rom with me today for the EVO 4G. I was under the false impression that he already tried it out…he didn’t! So now I’m stuck with froyo with no gmail or market functionality.
Other than those mods, I’ve done nothing else to my phone. I’m only saying this in hopes that it might help you understand what I’ve done to my phone and help you a bit more in the unrooting process.
Thanks again for trying to help!!
Sounds like you installed a cyanogenmod rom. The cyanogen team has to keep his OS changes and apps seperate from the official google apps.
But let me see if I can write up something so you can fully unroot from a modded OS.
Hmm, okay…
Yeah, I don’t know which specific team worked on it. Apparently a guy named Flipz worked on this crack of Froyo:
http://geekfor.me/new-release/fresh-evo-3101/
If you look on the comments of this page, you can see others are experiencing the same issues I have with the Android market, etc.
try downloading this RUU from xda and running it. It should be simple enough to just plug your phone in and run the executable. You should have HTC sync installed already right?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=685835
do you have rom manager installed by chance?
In that same thread, these instructions look solid.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=6855806&postcount=51