[Samsung Galaxy Mega] JCSouth:
As some of you may have seen, I've found a root method that seems to work and be stable. I just unrooted, tried it again and failed once, tried it immediately after and it was successful. I think I may have found out the glitch why it's not working for some of you. During the root process, you absolutely can NOT let the screen go blank, timeout, or change. Mine has failed every time doing that, when I keep it on and uninterrupted, I've had success with it in about a minute.

Secondly, I know a lot of you want to make custom roms and complain about the bootloader being locked. That's true, but mine is unlocked, even though I did trip the Knox warranty counter. From the testing I've done so far, I've made a backup from the Online Nandroid backup app. I have learned that it is impossible to restart the phone in recovery in any way, shape or form without triggering the *Unauthorized software found, return to AT&T* error message. However, what I've been doing there to get my phone back is going into download mode, using Odin 3.07 and flashing the bootloader from the stock NE7 firmware. That can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/download/9...711751_REV01_user_low_ship_MULTI_CERT.tar.md5 None of my stuff is lost, phone will reboot normally, everything looks good.

Now, as far as custom roms are concerned, since I have no idea about how to do that, I do have a custom recovery image saved through the other thing, but I don't know how to restore it through Odin. I do get kernel fail message if I try to enter recovery mode still, generally, all I have to do is power off and restart, it should work fine. If not, I load the bootloader image.

Having said that, it has me thinking. Since I'm basically using a custom rom already, I uninstalled the bundled bloatware and I *think* that's why I'm getting the error when I try, it may be possible to build around all of that and simply reflash the bootloader. I admit at this point, I'm in totally uncharted territory for myself and I'm not really even sure what trying to do a factory restore might do, but I do know I can recover using the stock firmware and then hopefully getting root access back to reload everything from Titanium Backup.

Until I get some sleep and enough nerve plus free time to try the factory restore to see if that is causing the issue, it's all theoretical. The point I'm getting at, and wanting to ask since I don't really know how it works, is if I can take the total stock rom as it is, root it without removing anything, and get it to boot into recovery from the phone or even through Odin, would that help the developers out there be able to come up with a workaround solution for this? I know I'm onto something, but I don't have the experience to proceed.

Since this phone has been dead and most of you have relegated it to a drawer or something, if you still have it, I'm guessing the Knox warranty 0x1 won't really mean a whole lot, so testing can be done. I'm trying my best with the total lack of knowledge I have and looking through different forums, but as I said, its beyond my experience level. I've cracked open the door folks, I can tell you absolutely, even if it does go into a bootloop or AT&T error, that bootloader will work without any loss except for the time it takes to get it done. I'm a bit brain fried right now, so if anyone has any suggestions, ideas, or whatever please comment. I believe this can be done, it was only a short time ago everyone said Root would never be on here, and now here it is. I also read in the Note 4 threads that once root access is gained, custom roms and things aren't going to be far behind.

Maybe there is a way to integrate that stock bootloader into a custom image without having to go around like I'm doing. I don't know programming very well. I'm sure that some of you folks with more experience and better minds than mine can come up with something based on my initial findings.