Samsung - Help with root and recovery on HDC Galaxy S4 EX
I have recently purchased two HDC Galaxy S4 EX phones which have the MTK6589T 1.5GHz CPU and 2GB RAM/32GB ROM.
I have been trying to get a CWM Recovery installed on it as well as rooting it but so far I have had no luck at all.
Firstly, I tried using MTK Droid Tools to modify a dump of my ROM and uploaded the recovery back to the phone using this procedure:
I did this by dumping the ROM off phone 1 (which I was avoiding starting up until I had a stock ROM backup) while I was playing around with phone 2. Phone 2 was booting into recovery mode by holding VolumeUp + Power and booting into a chinese factory mode by holding VolumeDown + Power. The recovery mode was very basic and did not have CWM.
So anyway, I dumped the ROM from phone 1 with SP tools, created a modified recovery image with MTK Droid Tools and downloaded that to phone 2. However I could not load either recovery mode or factory mode any more. No matter what key combination I tried the phone would just boot normally. I flashed back the unmodified recovery image and had the exact same problem. It wasn't until some time later I tried booting phone 1 and found it did not boot into recovery mode at all either . Unfortunately I only dumped the ROM from phone 1 and not phone 2 so I don't have a copy of the recovery image that seemed to boot ok on phone 2
So anyway, I have tried flashing a whole heap of recovery images from all sorts of HDC S4 sources but I have never been able to boot into any form of recovery mode with any of them. They ALWAYS just boot normally using either volume up or volume down. I'm not sure if that is because all of the images are for the 1.2GHz CPU instead of the 1.5GHz CPU.
The second problem is that I cannot root this phone at all.
I have tried the motochopper exploit which seems to be the only root option I have found for these phones (there are lots of options but they all appear to be the same tool).
When I run that root tool it copies the pwn, su and busybox to the phone fine but whenever it runs the pwn script it just comes up saying "Failure" without any explanation why.
The same thing happens when I try to use the root option with MTK Droid Tools.
So I'm at quite a loss right now, I can't get a CWM recovery image working and I can't get root....
I've tried flashing some of the HDC S4 ROMs but so far none of them have booted (I'm guessing because it is the MTK6589T model?).
The only option I have had is to flash back my original ROM dump.
Is there any way to alter a recovery image to change the boot keys it uses?
Are the boot keys even defined in the recovery image? is it maybe something else like the preloader or boot image I should be trying to change?
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated, I can't wait to start customizing my own ROM for this phone...