[Asus ZenPad 10 Guides, News, & Discussion] diplomatic:
This is mainly a temporary repost of [MENTION=8879499]rakomancha[/MENTION]'s TWRP announcement in a new thread. He is the maintainer of this TWRP but has not signed into XDA for a while. There is an updated TWRP that I wanted to share. When he comes back and creates his own thread, I will replace this post with a link to his.

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[TWRP][RECOVERY] Asus ZenPad 3S 10 Z500M

The next big step forward for Z500M development is here!

This is the first working custom TWRP recovery for the Asus ZenPad 3S 10 Z500M [P027], based from TWRP v3.2.1.

diplomatic and I had both been working on a port separately, and I offered to test his version. In a few hours we worked out a functional and install-friendly version.

Please NOTE that this is NOT an official TWRP. After this post, I'll be working on making the port official and update here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project, and my own motivation, would not have been possible without the incredible work and input of:

diplomatic, who has been instrumental in propelling Z500M development forward. He worked on the issue of perm root and discovered and revealed important intricacies of the Z500M restrictive bootloader. By the end of Dec 2017, he developed a method to unlock the Z500M bootloader based on his amazing work with the Z380M. With amartolos as his testing assistant, the Z500M bootloader unlocking tool was quickly developed and released Jan 5th 2018.

overkillZ, who in Sept 2017 introduced us all to rooting the Z500M

toineh, who did legwork of establishing temp root by manipulating system permissions & redirecting files through adb. Then he took the boot.img posted by LGiki, explained how to patch it through Magisk and posted the first patched boot image. He also served as a guiding voice on this front.

amartolos, who first attempted perm flashing the patched boot image of toineh's method and worked with diplomatic on the developments afterward, which led us to today. Also has served as a guiding voice.

LGiki, who was the first to post an extracted WW_27 boot image that got things rolling forward

DISCLAIMER

This image has only been successfully tested by me at this point.

Please exercise caution and care when attempting to flash anything to your device.

You are completely responsible for any possible issues or damages resultant from undertaking the following procedures.

That being said, this image and method should be safe.

REQUIREMENTS

ZenPad Z500M tablet, upgraded to Android N

Bootloader Unlocked, using Diplomatic's tool. Tablet should be showing Orange State during initial bootup.

Root with Magisk installed, Permanent Root preferable

BACK UP YOUR INTERNAL USER DATA, in case you need to factory reset

TWRP for Z500M recovery image file [twrp-3.2.1-0-z500m.img]

Knowledge of adb/fastboot and basic Linux shell

INSTRUCTIONS

Ensure REQUIREMENTS are all met

Ensure to RE-READ all instructions and understand them before starting

Reboot into fastboot mode

do fastboot boot twrp-3.2.1-0-z500m.img, TWRP should boot up in a few seconds. The theme should be blue.

In TWRP, go to BACKUP and back up Boot, Recovery, Data, System and SystemImage. Full backup took me about 10GB of space.

Copy the created TWRP Backup to your PC or an external location for safekeeping

Copy the TWRP twrp-3.2.1-0-z500m.img to tablet storage if not done already.

In TWRP, go to INSTALL, select Install Image and choose the twrp-3.2.1-0-z500m.img. Installation should only take a few seconds.

Unplug from USB and Reboot back into Recovery through the REBOOT menu

If installation went well, TWRP should boot up in a YELLOW theme. From my testing, I'm confident it is functionally the same.

RESOURCES

In this shared folder are

TWRP for Z500M recovery image file [twrp-3.2.1-0-z500m.img]

version 0.5 of Diplomatic's Unlock Tool

diplomatic's Z500M device source

hxxps://mega.nz/#F!SQlyDapC!XbbW0fftZWFfVx2lmL_JUQ [down, get the file below]

GOING FORWARD

I successfully tested replacement of Magisk with SuperSU. My steps taken were:

"Completely Uninstall" Magisk through the Magisk Manager

reboot directly into Recovery

INSTALL a previously downloaded official SuperSU zip file & REBOOT

I very much enjoyed this process of developing for uncharted regions of Android technologies and I owe all of that to the existence of this forum and the people in it. Next, I am reading up on porting a custom ROM, LineageOS looked very nice. I'll update here with significant progress until I get capability to start new forum threads. Thank you all and enjoy delicious functional TWRP custom recovery on your Z500M for the first time in history. Here's to looking forward to development exploding on this device.

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NEW DOWNLOAD

Updated February, 2018

Fixes the yellow color rendering in installed mode

twrp-3.2.1-0-z500m.zip

ADDITIONAL WARNING: At first boot of TWRP, it will ask you if you want to keep system read-only. Touch the Keep Read Only button at this screen and only mount system in read-only mode if you need (rarely needed). This is necessary because of dm-verity and is no different than most Android 6+ devices. Unless you have unlocked your bootloader and installed permanent root with dm-verity disabled, mounting the system partition in r/w mode will make changes to it and your tablet will instantly become unbootable.