Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Factory reset left root intact?


I rooted my Dream/G1 last night and finally gave up on modding it (not for good mind you, but for the moment) and opted instead to just restore it to factory settings via Settings > SD card & phone storage > Factory data reset, which did solve all the problems I was having with multitasking (and not being able to answer it, etc.)


Curiously, I still seem to have root on the phone, despite having reset it. I'd love to understand how that is possible! Superuser Permissions is the only non-stock app still on the phone, and I'm still able to use su to gain root privileges from adb shell. Is this because BusyBox installs to my SD Card?


My phone works just fine, so this is hardly critical, but the whole exercise was/is about knowing my phone better and this is most def. a mystery. Thanks!



Answer



Root things (su, busybox and Superuser.apk) are installed in /system, which is usually on a special partition. This partition is usually mounted as read-only. (Remember mount command, that is neccesary to allow writing there...) It is likely that this partition is not affected by master reset.


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