[General Questions and Answers] Metrogirl:
A couple of notes.

Hi,

The following is pretty basic stuff but I thought it might help some folks.

I successfully rooted my FeiTeng H7100 after flashing Adroidia's unsecured boot.img which he posted a short while ago. I may have a different version of the phone (my scatter didn't totally match) so I didn't want to flash the complete image. Probably needless paranoia but the boot.img matched mine, flashing only that was instantly successful and I can mess around with other stuff later. I used ADB and ADB shell to complete the root manually but I'm sure that packaged exploits would work once the unsecured image is loaded.

There were a couple of wrinkles which I thought I'd share with you concerning getting the boot.img to flash. Like I said, basic stuff which most folks probably know, but if it helps someone then I am happy.

Firstly, I found that it is quite possible for the phone to connect and work with ADB but still not be seen by the flash tool because the driver you are using doesn't deal with the preboot device. Mine was happy with ADB using a driver I'd installed earlier but when I connected the phone without battery I had an unknown device show up so obviously it was never going to flash until I fixed that. Just because ADB works, you don't necessarily have the right driver installed for flashing.

Secondly, in this battery-less mode the device will connect and then disconnect itself after a few seconds. I wasn't expecting the device to simply vanish like this. I discovered after some research that this is normal but the phone is pretty much guaranteed to disconnect while you are trying to install a driver or trying to start the flash after you plug the USB in. My paranoid thought was 'what happens if it disconnects during the flash? Brick?' Answer - no, it won't disconnect during the flash once it has connected, but there is a trick (see below) to getting it to connect.

Solutions:

Driver issue: before connecting the battery-less phone to USB, open Device Manager and expand the COM port section. If you see a new VCOM port pop up when you connect the phone, you have the right driver and you are good to go. If you see a yellow triangle and an unknown MT6577 device pop up, disconnect the phone and download and unpack "MT6577 USB VCOM Drivers.7z" which you can find easily on the internet. After a reboot if you don't see the VCOM port when you connect the battery-less phone, quickly right-click that yellow triangle before it vanishes and choose 'update driver', then browse to where you unpacked the drivers. You may have to do this twice as there are two bits to the driver. Once there are no yellow triangles and you see the VCOM device you can move onto the flashing step.

Auto-disconnect issue: flashing is pretty much following the instructions - battery out etc. But do not connect the phone right away. In the flash tool, when you are all ready to go, you will see that there's a box near the bottom which says "USB". Now click download and see that the box changes to 'Searching'. Only connect your phone when you see 'Searching'. The flash tool will find the phone and capture it before it has the chance to disconnect itself and everything is fine from that point ... you'll see the red bar start, you quickly stuff the battery into the phone and the flash completes. Actually I fumbled getting the battery in and was a bit late with that but the flash completed just fine anyway.

I hope this helps someone, the cycling disconnect thing had me really confused for a bit.

-S

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