[Android Software/Hacking General [Developers Only]] x1123:
MrCabana,

welcome to the club. Your experience and your willing to inform all of us here is really VALUABLE LESSONS .. I'm far from a programmer. Tweaking android phone is new Hobby for me. But mostly I did Hardware Tweaking than software tweaking.

ln -s is symbolic links, did you try with ln -P, symbolic links can survive upon the real file deleted is strange for me. Your guess related to existence of secret scripts to prevent rw mount at /system is probably a trick by vendor to avoid user poked /system and caused device failure. Coz some of user doing NOT FAIR , they play with device, once something happened beyond their capability, they brought to service center since device is within warranty period and device totally off, service center probably can not check the real things happened. I have no experience like you with many device. all my devices will have RW moount by changing default.prop at ro.secure=0 and this is AFAIK is the real ROOTING.

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[MENTION=3924647]bigrammy[/MENTION] : my screen resolution is 800x480 (just as stated in persist.sys.screen.size property listed above). I am sorry, but I would have to do some reading before telling you I know what TWRP is. I figured out just yesterday what you all meant by CWM: I believe it's that ClockWorkMode thing when I reboot into recovery state. The menu has changed and a few more options were available when I flashed this hacked recovery.img file. I could successfully revert the camera not working thing, by just editing my own boot.img (extracted from my own phone, not downloaded ones for H2000+).[/quote]

android terminology is vague sometimes TWRP (Team Win Recovery Project) is BRAND of touch recovery with nice appearance CMW is I think ClockWorkMod or also well known as CWR = Clock Work Recovery. Editing our boot.img from the phone is best bet, since by downloading from NET, we don't know what someone was doing with the ramdisk which containing critical file init.rc

Android Kitchen is great and help a lot of people to cook their rom. But I personally prefer to trust our finger. splitting, unpacking, repacking TOOLS are available and easily to be access by public. However some people forgot .. a script run in a system will give different result by running in other system. i.e most of script for splitting, packing and repacking are perl scripts if the perl in the system not match with the requirement, it will caused problems. The other think like unpacking ramdisk. by default linux kernel configuration (mostly for android) is compressed by gzip but some people use LZMA, Bzip, Xzip etc etc. Some of small android phone vendor did not perform their obligation by releasing kernel source code and in their binary kernel did not "store" configuration information. I don't really know is this violating GPL ?

It will be great if you wish to share the script you wrote

AFAIK, unless we have the kernel source code, or configurations, we don't know what is the Real Kernel Version. I believed to know kernel version we can get from adb with command : $ cat /proc/version this will inform linux kernel and GCC version.

But kernel is not the most issue on your case.

Some vendor faked Android Versions, and many users did not know and only interesting to higher version will be better. In some reason, many of device will be at TOP performance with Android 2.2 (froyo), by flashing jelly bean (4.1 / 4.2) the device probably will run slower. Very rarely we read Release Note from google. Phone vendor faking the android version to increase their selling value and crowd grabbing without thinking. Thus I personally don't know how to check they real android version. coz we can also faked built fingerprint

Intention to put an apk in /system/app is to avoid deletion upon factory reset. But it is NOT mandatory. I have one MT6577 and accidentally IMEI Number is erased. MT Droid Tools can rewrite the IMEI, but at /userdata partition, everytime wiping /userdata .. I need to rewrite the IMEI :D ... IMEI should be in NVRAM, since I played a lot of things, NVRAM is deleted. Flashing back up NVRAM not give me IMEI back.

I have No a device like you ... I read your long post and it was really interesting ... or frustating.

some of app can be disabled without ROOT previllege. To tweak battery life, you need top tweak the kernel, mean rebuild kernel from source, editing some configuration and patching if possible. BTW, since your phone is MT6577, I think you can modify existed boot.img, unpack the boot, poke the ramdisk and tweak the init.rc or other available init by switching OFF some services i.e is you are not using tethering, just switch off tethering service, as well as with SSH with mostly for adb via wifi function.

I did not pay attention to this block more than you ...

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2nd) maybe it's a composite mount? I mean, /system is mount of mmcblk0p3, but besides that mount there's another mount from somewhere else? This is what seems to happen with /data, for example. If so, the phone might get confused on where to save the files I change/add to this mount.

3rd) what if I mount mmcblk0p3 somewhere else? I am not sure, but maybe it's possible to have the same block file system mounted at two places at the same time. Let's say I create a folder (mount point) somewhere I have all the permissions, in /data/local/system for example, then I make the changes I want to that folder instead of /system.[/quote]

Technically it is possible to mount a partition into several mount points, but I things a lot of messy with application will occur.

How will you do, backing up all file / image and reflash ? I think the /fstab file can tell a lot. in android usually named by vold.fstsb or something like fstab.device-name

AFAIK the marking ro how they/vendor do ?since it is about mounting ... even we have ro.secure=0 on normal boot the /system is mount in RO mode, with adb command and help of su and busybox user can mount RW in simple one is [b} adb remount [/b] or adb remount -rw ....

Your post is really valuable ... at least for me :D .... no hesitate please to post your rooting journey