[Android General] zrfl:
Hi,

as I did not find an English guide for rooting a BQ Aquaris M10 tablet and had some problems when trying to root my tablet, I want to post an guide how to root this tablet.

First of all:

- This guide is just from my experience and is not thoroughly tested. It's on your own if you risk bricking your device.

- If you get stuck in the process, in nearly all cases you can revert to stock with the MTK flash tool (can be found on mibqyyo.com) and the images provided by BQ on their website.

- I could not unlock the bootloader with the 1.X-Images (Lollipop), as the VolumeUp-Button didn't work in fastboot-mode and you need this button to confirm the unlock.

- Booting into recovery from start with VolumeUp and Power-Button. This doesn't work with the 1.X-images, too.

- This guide is not intended for users without experience in unlocking/rooting a device. If you don't know how to use adb, fastboot, recovery and things like that, don't try it!

- You will loose all your data during this process!!

Guide:

Modify boot.img, flash new firmware

SuperSU in systemless mode doesn't work on stock image, as the SuperSU installer can't extract boot.img. You have to repack boot.img.

I tried a SuperSU installer without systemless-mode, but device didn't even boot anymore afterwards.

This guide is derived from a Spanish tutorial on the HTCmania-forum ("Root M10 HD Marshmallow") by yquepongo. Thanks to him!

Get a firmware for your device from the BQ-website (should be Marshmallow, see above) and unzip it to a directory.

Extract the boot-verified.img in the firmware directory with a bootimg-extractor. There are various tools available.

I used bootimg.exe, because this was explained in the mentioned thread and I even used it with wine on Linux and it went well.

Search for cpiolist.txt in your extracted boot-verified.img and delete the first two lines:

mode:mtk

mtk_header_name:ROOTFS

Repack boot-verified.img and put it back in the firmware directory.

Flash the modified firmware with the MTK flash tool according to the tutorial on .mibqyyo.com (Title "Hard Reset for the smartphone range Aquaris and Aquaris E"). In short: Disconnect device, start Tool, load scatter file from firmware directory, choose firmware upgrade, start download, connect the device in power off state, download will start automatically.

This will delete all your data and put the device back to factory rom (hard reset)!!!

If you don't want to flash the complete firmware, you can flash only the boot-verified.img with "Download only" in the flash tool. I didn't try this and don't know if this is working.

Start your device, don't activate any security settings to prevent encryption of data partition.

Unlock bootloader, flash TWRP, install SuperSU

Enable developer settings on device and activate "OEM unlock" in developer settings.

Reboot into fastboot (adb reboot bootloader) and unlock bootloader (fastboot oem-unlock).

This will delete all your data!!! Reboot your system afterwards to make sure everything is still ok.

Do not activate any security settings and make sure your data partition is not encrypted!

The existing TWRP-image can't handle an encrypted data partition, you will end in a boot loop and have to start the whole process again!

Double check, your data partition isn't encrypted. ;) (Settings - Security)

Reboot into fastboot (adb reboot bootloader) and flash the TWRP-image from the TWRP-site (fastboot flash recovery twrpxxx.img)

After reboot TWRP should start.

If you have checked that everything is ok (I would recommend a reboot into normal mode), you can install SuperSU with the standard-installer-zip in TWRP.

If you didn't modify your boot.img, the installer will give a warning that it cannot extract boot.img and you will not find any SuperSU on your system.

If you get stuck in bootloop afterwards you can start anew and try it with another image flashed with MTK flash tool. (Firmware 2.2.0 from December 2016 for freezerhd worked in my case)

Maybe some steps could be shortened, but I haven't tried it.