[Asus ZenPad 10 Guides, News, & Discussion] diplomatic:
Convert your ZenPad 3s 10 from CN to WW firmware

​

This guide will show you how to flash the WW firmware to your ZenPad Z500M that came preloaded with the CN (China) ROM. Up until recently, this was problematic because the CN firmware, as well as the 13.x series in general, is locked down. It does not provide flashing access via the common methods like unlocking+fastboot, recovery or SP Flash Tool. But thanks to a MediaTek temporary root tool invented by some evil genius, it's now possible to upgrade your CN ZenPad to the latest WW ROM. It's well known that this variant comes with Google apps and is fully unlockable and rootable.

DISCLAIMER

Any procedures described in this thread are done at your own risk. No one else will be responsible for any data loss, corruption or damage of your device, including that which results from software bugs.

REQUIREMENTS

An ASUS ZenPad Z500M (P027) tablet with 13.x firmware

Either:

A PC with ADB installed to interact with your device, or

A terminal emulator app

Familiarity with ADB (if using PC) and basic Linux shell commands

Familiarity with the Thanks button under XDA posts

INSTRUCTIONS

Read and understand this whole procedure before you start. This is about as dangerous as installing a full OTA update, and you would have to try hard to mess it up in a way that your device cannot be recovered. But keep in mind that it is a possibility. Make sure your battery has decent charge or plug it into the charger.

Go to Amazing Temp Root for MediaTek ARMv8 and read the directions on how to open a root shell in ADB or a terminal emulator app, and make sure you understand them. Download the latest release of mtk-su. Support the developer. ;)

Download and unzip the recovery image to your tablet. Link below.

Open a root shell and flash the image to your recovery partition with:

dd if=recovery.img of=/dev/block/platform/mtk-msdc.0/11230000.MSDC0/by-name/recovery bs=1048576

You may need to specify the full path of the img file.

Download the latest 14.x WW firmware from ASUS' support site. Link below.

Put the official zip package in the root of your internal storage. Rename the file by changing the letters "WW" to "CN". That is, rename UL-P027-WW-14.0210.1806.33-user.zip to UL-P027-CN-14.0210.1806.33-user.zip. This has to be done in the same boot session as the recovery flashing step.

At this point, the OS updater should detect the file, prepare the upgrade and ask you to reboot. Confirm that you want to reboot to install. Make sure that you have succeeded step 4.

Your tablet will reboot and automatically install the WW 14.x package. You may need/want to do a factory reset after this.

Alternative method to zip file autodetection: reboot to recovery and do an adb sideload install.

NOTES

Do not try to install any 13.x firmware package using this method. That's because if something goes wrong and your device fails to boot, you would not be able to get root access to repair it. It may be next to impossible to recover it. The 13.x releases are locked down, unlike the 14.x (Android 7) ones.

If for any reason you reboot your tablet after doing the dd flashing step but before successfully installing the 14.x ROM, your original recovery will get restored. You will have to flash it again before trying the upgrade.

Do not try to downgrade from a 14.x FW to 13.x via TWRP. It is a fact that this will make your tablet unbootable because the 13.x packages do not provide all the necessary images.

DOWNLOAD

WW-13.x Recovery Image

ASUS Z500M firmware downloads

CREDITS

Thanks to [MENTION=10081201]lemon0o[/MENTION] for successfully testing this method. :good: