[Samsung Galaxy Tab A series Guides, News, & Discus] Mad.Cactus:
Wow where to start? The purchase. So I have a friend pick me up a "like new" Pad A off of craigslist; She was 45min closer to the sale than myself, so hey wtf? Shes got good judgement.. Urm, sge gets to my house with it, and what the he.. no charger NO TYPE C (which I dont have on hand) and tablet is dead dead. So it gets set aside for a couple of days.. I finally get it charged and wtf is this.? Enter in my # off of sales receipt? Oh boy here we go. I had not encountered this DiSa yet, however we made it, I know I can break it, so lets go!

Part 1: Assemble the files

I proceed to go on a downloading frenzy, throwing caution to the wind and downloading everything I can find firmware wise for this thing. Its worth noting that the unit is on Oreo at this point. I locate a combination file fairly early on in the tabs life cycle, on nougat, and blast this infernal thing with odin. Hey cool!? Factory Binary eh? Hey I can sideload to it, so I install a couple of things. Here is where this gets fuzzy...

Part 2: Breaking it

So a couple of apps get installed, I muck around a bit with it, then intentionally try to break it by patching dif boot.img files from other firmwares and flashing, etc etc careless stuff. I end up flashing another, much newer combo file and seem to be back to square one. HOWEVER, I gleamed a bit of useful info that I did not know before: that when flashing the four-file-firmware packs, using the plain CSC files wipes the userdata, where CSC_HOME does not. Lightbulb! I install a couple of apps that were handy for FRP bypassing because you could have them autostart, then.....

Part 3a: Oreo and F*^% My Mobile

I install the latest firm I could find, a Oreo build (AP_T380DXU2BRK2_CL14346227_QB20632006_REV00_user_low_ship_MULTI_CERT_meta) from late last year. To my joy, it booted up and DiSa was gonzo'ed. Yay! So I quickly blast through setup, frantically hit that build version 50 times to show it whose the developer boss, OEM Unlock TWRP here I come. Not so fast it says, for I still have some unpaid balance or some horse sh%%$. Ah man!

Part 3b:: Fool My Mobile

So I do a little research, and hey this has already been beat! COOOOOL. Throwing caution to the wind, I locate the required patched version of Miracle Box 2.58, run it, with it running set my date two years back on PC, cllosed MB, put tab in download mode, re-run MB, go to Samsung tab, check the Reset ReActivation/EE radio button, click start, it blips and bleeps and hisses and whirs... Reset into DL mode to check lock status.... TOTALLY GONE. Not even a mention of that hideous thing!

Part 4: TWRP, Etc.

All this has been covered in depth already so we wont beat that dead horse. Use Magisk to patch boot.img, flash patched booty.img.tar, everything goes awsy one last time. WINNER! It is, however, worth noting that if doing this on Oreo, you have to manually decompress the boot.img.lz4 file with lz4.exe (if in windows) with something like: lz4.exe -d boot.img.lz4 boot.img.ext4 ... then feed that file to Magisk. Anyhow, from DiSa and FMM locked to TWRP Root and happys in nuttin flat. Hope this entertained somebody ;)

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