[Adam Outler] and friends have been hard at work unlocking the bootloader of some Verizon Android devices. His most recent adventure involves unlocking the Verizon branded Samsung Galaxy Note II.
You can’t run Cyanogenmod on a device that has a locked bootloader. This is presumably why it took no time at all for the XDA forum users with Verizon phones to raise enough money to put one of these puppies in [Adam’s] hands. He walks through the process he used to find the exploit in the video after the break. We’re not experts on the process, but apparently the .pit file used when flashing Odin is the entry point for the exploit. A bit of code has been injected into it which provides an opening to flash a replacement bootloader.
We mentioned the Galaxy S3 in the title. Apparently that has been unlocked as well but with one big hang-up. An over-the-air update could possibly brick the S3. To avoid this issue with the Galaxy Note II the original bootloader is patched and reflashed as part of the exploit.
These people never cease to amaze me — the amount of patience and technical know-how needed to reverse engineer and exploit hardware at such a low level is truly impressive.
Kudos to these guys.
HAYELL yeah, it’s about time
ODIN MODE – classic!
“You can’t run Cyanogenmod on a device that has a locked bootloader.”
I’ve been doing it for years with the DROID 2, 3, and 4.
Deleting or renaming the two updater apk files disables the ota updates completely on the S3.. even future ones.
The S3 on verizon has been able to be unlocked for quite some time now, there’s a bunch of different ways to do it even. One guy made a couple of free apps in the market even for the lazy ones who refuse to use adb. An over the air wont brick the s3 after unlock, it could soft brick it but that takes all of 5 minutes to fix. If your running a custom recovery you shouldn’t accept over the airs anyway, someone usually has them in a zip ready to go the same day. Check out rootzwiki.
Par for the course I’m afraid. These guys like to release other peoples stuff and call themselves “da haXor” all the time :(
“You can’t run Cyanogenmod on a device that has a locked bootloader. ” ← False.
Next one to do. Unlock the Motorola Photon Q without voiding the warranty. Motorola and Sprint have it setup where you can get the unlock code for free, but then they know you’ve done it and *poof* warranty gone forever even if you never do anything else to it. You don’t even have to actually unlock it, just requesting the code voids the warranty.
If you’re ever going to root your Android device, why would you leave the default bootloader on it? Almost any factory bootloader can overwrite sections of the ROM and temporarily(or sometimes permanently) brick the device if it’s not overwriting what it thinks it is.
I tried to do the gs3 unlock and it passed odins flashing but it still won t work with other sim cards. What is wrong?
You’re looking for a network unlock but this article is about bootloader unlocking which is to allow gs3 and note 2 on verizon to install BOTH a custom recovery AND kernel without multiple boots (KEXEC). Verizon GS3 come unlocked :) just download Phoneinfo and HiAPN global from the market are you are good to go.
what do you do after you download that?