[Replicant] backup stock ROM without root

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 22 Aug 2018 06:02:38 +0000
Fil Lupin <fillupin at protonmail.com> wrote:

> If you know how to backup all partition of a stock samsung device,
> could you say it? 
You can do it by
1) getting root without touching anything else
2) backuping the recovery
3) replacing the recovery with a recovery that has adb, and booting
   on that to backup the rest of the partitions.

I never tried to get root without touching anything else, so I don't
know how easy it is to do it.

There is also another way which may require some work, and requires a
proprietary software operating system: Samsung has recovery tools that
run on windows, and the recovery tools are able to get stock images and
reinstall them on the smartphone. So it's probably possible for someone
to run such tool and get the URL of the recovery tools. However I've no
idea if the URL are permanent or if it uses some other ways to download
the files.

The approach rooting approach seem way more reliable for users, and the
root exploits are probably already free software.

All you have to do is to either:
- find a root exploit that works for you and that you can trust, which
  doesn't do anything else than getting you temporary root access
- or find an existing free software root application and modify it to
  only give you root within a shell, by stripping it of all unnecessary
  code. This may require you to successfully compile the exploit code,
  or to extract the exploit code from it (if's it's a separate
  executable this should be easy as apk are zip files).

> If you know this is not possible, could you let me know?
It's possible but I didn't do it myself, so I don't know the way to get
root without touching anything else. Doing probably require some work
or testing, and may or may not take a long time to do.

Denis.
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