[Verizon Galaxy Note 3 General] bftb0:
At it's heart, the method involved is OS independent, so in principle any rooted ROM will do. (I did it from rooted-stock-mj7 running in a Safestrap alternate slot).

In practice, there are some sanity checks in the code to try and make sure idiots don't wreck their phones using this, and some of those things turned out to have weak dependencies on OS rev (checking that the phone was a Samsung :o and that the CID starts with 0x15), so the original code compilation would fail on those checks inappropriately. With a little assistance from others [MENTION=1923941]donc113[/MENTION] compiled a few changes to fix those things up - use his version mentioned in my post above.

Even when it failed in those cases, it failed to a "do nothing" operation - print an error message and exit. So, there is little risk in trying.

Make sure to read the OP and note that your SD card will get overwritten, so prepare for that in advance.

In preparation for trying other ROMs, and the remote possibility that one day I might want to revert this, before I unlocked, I:

- archived the source code (donc113's version)

- recorded my existing CID

- made raw dump backups of partitions 1 - 22

- created a debrick image (it has extra stuff not in the above including MBR,UEFI,PIT, and MD5 tables)

- made backups of all slots using the methods provided by the pseudo recovery in Safestrap (/multisystem)

- [ optional: TiBu what you want ]

- made a backup of everything I valued on the "internal" SDcard

- got all of the above off the phone into safe keeping

- inserted a smaller "don't care" micro SDcard into the phone instead of my daily driver.

After unlocking and installing a true custom recovery, I:

- I made a TWRP backup of the current ROM {*1}

- I did a raw dump of the (now modified) aboot partition (p6)

- using the recovery boot, I created raw dumps of the persdata (p22), persist(p21), and efs (p11) partitions {*2}

- I copied all the above off the phone into safe keeping

good luck & ask questions about using custom recoveries **in a different thread**

{*1} Safestrap alternate slots are not captured by an external custom recovery backup as they live in /data/media or similar. So if you ever restore a Safestrap (multisystem?) ROM with alternate slots , the restore process is a bit longer:

- get your backups to the phone somehow (external SD card or using USB OTG / MTP with custom recovery TWRP)

- restore the (external custom recovery) TWRP backup (this only restores the "stock slot")

- boot into the Safestrap (/multisystem?) Stock slot and take the pseudo - recovery diversion

- recreate the needed alternate slot container blobs, and restore your Safestrap alternate slot backups into each of the (newly recreated) alternate slots.

You have to pay attention to "disk" usage during all of this; the backups are pretty big. In Safestrap's psuedo-recovery, you can't use OTG or MTP so you might have to booot back and forth between the two recoveries to get the job done. (Or buy an extra, huge external uSDcard)

{*2} These ext4 partitions are mounted in the normal OS boot, so dumping them (using dd) in the recovery captures these partitions in a cleanly unmounted state.