[Nook HD, HD+ General] max_frustration:
success report cm 10.2 nook HD+ without booting from sdcard

Booting from an external SD card seems to be a widespread problem with the Nook HD+.

The method below describes installing Cyanogenmod without doing this.

After much Drang und Sturm fighting a cranky Nook, I finally got a successful install of Cyanogenmod.

I tried many many times to get the device to boot to an external SD card and finally gave up. I had

tried seven different SD cards, all different methods for formatting, all sorts of different ways of booting,

and nothing worked. I read that getting an HD+ to boot this way could be troublesome and I certainly

found that to be true.

What did work was an attack via adb. Getting adb to work on a Windows 7 or above machine involves

sidestepping its security about unsigned drivers, which is another utterly befuddling thing until you figure

out what the problem there is. See someone0's adb installation on W-7 posting if that's your problem.

With working adb, I used Kingo Android Root, which uses who-knows-what privilege-escalation exploit to

get root. Then it writes a setuid su binary into the /system/ directory and then issues a reboot command.

Because the stock boot binary employs an SHA1 manifest against every file in /system, this gratuitous

reboot will result in a boot loop and automatic overwrite of the entire operating system partition. Sigh.

However, there is a split second between when the su binary is copied over and when the device is

rebooted and if you yank the usb cable at exactly the right moment, you have a rooted Nook. Ta da.

(Note, this pertains to version 1.1.6. I recently got a message from Kingo that they may be examining

this issue soon.)

Then I used verygreen's nookhd-unlocked-stock-emmc-ovation-2.1.1.zip. I unzipped this, and adb push'ed

the boot.img therein, and dd'ed the image into the boot partition as the contained updater-script would have.

With this cyanoboot boot image, root access becomes persistent and will not be lost upon reboot.

Next, I unzipped flash_recovery_ovation_TWRP_2.6.3.0_internal.zip, adb push'ed the contained recovery.img

and dd'ed into the recovery partition (/dev/block/mmcblk0p3) as specified by it's upgrader-script.

With TWRP in place, after a little fuzting with the "N" and power buttons, I got TWRP to boot. Next, I downloaded

cm-10.2-20131224-NIGHTLY-ovation.zip and copied it to an sd card. Finding what TWRP calls the external

sdcard was a little tricky, it's not any of the dir's containing ext, but the plain /sdcard/ one. Wiping the caches is

absolutely vital when installing a new Android OS; I didn't appreciate the full gravity of that at first, but the

standard TWRP wipe menu item was sufficient if employed in proper sequence.

This produced a working cyanogenmod 10.2 OS on this Nook.

I did not load the Google apps separately. Looking at the unzip listing of the google apps zip, I think I am

missing about a dozen programs. They all seem to be stuff I wouldn't want though so I never did load them.

When I booted to CM 10.2 I had Google Play however, so I don't plan to load the g-apps.

Summary:

You must disable Windows-7 security to load an unsigned driver.

Kingo Android Root successfully rooted my 2.1.1 stock OS but I had to short-circuit its reboot attempt.

verygreen's boot loader produced durable root.

TWRP worked better for me than Clockworkmod which I had tried before.

CM 10.2 seems to be a reasonable OS. It has been stable so far (1 week).

Special thanks to:

leapinlar

verygreen

someone0

the TWRP team

the Cyanogen team

kingoapp.com (somewhere in China)

Max