[Galaxy Ace II Android Development] krazykipa:
Hello,

I am starting this thread in the hopes of spurring some investigation into how to unlock the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2(X) without paying for an unlock code or for a service box such as Octoplus etc. All other methods for unlocking Samsung devices (dialer code, nv_data etc) do not work on this device.

I have made a little bit of progress on my own device, the GT-S7560m or Galaxy Ace 2X, outlined here. Unfortunately, I cannot provide a method to unlock as of yet, as the method I currently have found will replace the target device IMEI with the IMEI of the 'donor' device. I have not found a way to change the IMEI back (yet).

First, what I did was simple: Root the phone and backup all partitions other than /system, /data, /cache (/dev/block/mmcblk0pX) I did this a couple of times in between reboots and factory resets to have multiple backups as well as to see if any partitions change after reboots or resets.

It turns out that there are five partitions which change (slightly or drastically) after reboots/resets. These are:

mmcblk0p9

mmcblk0p10

mmcblk0p11

mmcblk0p13

mmcblk0p19 (/efs, found via mount command)

Since the S7560M does not have a GPT partition table, I can't find the labels for what these partitions actually are. 11,13 and 19 are mostly blank, while 9 and 10 are chock full.

Next, I bought an unlock service on eBay. Once unlocked, I took another image of all the partitions, and compared which ones were changed (locked vs unlocked). Unsurprisingly, the same five partitions were different.

To narrow it down, I the flashed back the locked versions of these partitions until my simlock returned.

mmcblk0p9 is the partition that holds the simlock data

I tested flashing only p9 and, indeed, simlock disappeared and reappeared according to the version being flashed. I have multiple devices to test with at the moment, so I took the unlocked p9 from Phone A and flashed it to Phone B, and sure enough, Phone B could then accept foreign SIM cards.

Unfortunately, this also changed Phone B's IMEI to that of Phone A

I tried various tools to attempt to zero out the IMEI (so that the partition image can be shared between devices and the end-user can then restore their proper IMEI) to no avail. It seems the NV items on this device are locked or read-only for some reason.

CDMA Workshop, NV Items Reader-Writer, QPST, QXDM, all these tools are able to read NV items fine, but when trying to write back NV item 550 ue_imei it inevitably fails. In QPST an unknown error (0x80004005) is thrown when writing, whereas in QXDM the program states "No DIAG response received" when attempting to write the NV item. I tried multiple phones, PCs and versions of Windows with the same error.

You'll recall that on other devices such as the GS3, QPST/QXDM/etc works perfectly fine to restore the IMEI through NV editing.

I believe mmcblk0p9 is the 'real' EFS partition, holding the NV items for the device. It also seems to be encrypted, since I cannot find the IMEI in hex nor decimal format inside it, yet the IMEI is changed when the partition is cross-flashed. Across phones and even simply rebooting, the partition almost completely changes, save for a header and a couple of other bytes.

In order to unlock the device freely, I believe the next step is to either decrypt mmcblk0p9, or find a way to get QPST/QXDM to write to the phone

If you have any thoughts/experience, feel free to post below! I am sort of stuck here.