Rooting & Unrooting Micromax Funbook Pro

Well, here is another rooting guide from me. This time it's on Funbook Pro P500, a 10 inch tablet from the Indian manufacturer Micromax. I am not going to talk much about the tablet here, there are several reviews on it across the internet and a good Google search could land several results on this. All I can say about it is that I have been using it over the past 6-7 months and it has been an awesome tablet at its price point.

Before I started writing this blogpost I noticed that there are several articles on the internet emphasizing on rooting Funbook Pro, but most of them focus of either using an application or a tool to get this done. However in this post, I am going to use only the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) keeping you in control of the process.

In one of my previous posts (Rooting & Unrooting HCL Me X1), I have already mentioned the advantages and risks of Rooting, please do go through it before proceeding further. Let me reiterate one point from that post - Trying to root your device might brick the device. I am not responsible if you brick your device, so proceed at your own risk.

Rooting the Device

You don't really require any exploit or any application to root the Funbook Pro, it is possible to root the device using the adb shell so make sure you have the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) on your system.

Connect the device through the USB and open the shell using adb shell at the command prompt. You would be seeing a $ here indicating that the shell does not have root access. Exit from the adb shell and restart the adb on the device using adb root, a message stating that restarting adbd as root would appear. Go back to adb shell, you would see a # now indicating that the shell has root access.

Inspecting the ro.secure property either using getprop ro.secure or from /default.prop would return a value of 1. This indicates that the adb will not login as root by default and hence we have to use the adb root command when we want root access using the adb shell.

Though the adb shell has root access, the su command which is used in Linux doesn't work in Android since there is no su binary in Android. So our next step is to setup the su command on the device. Download the su binary and the Superuser application from here.

There are two steps for rooting the device -

1. Copying the su binary to the /system/bin directory

Unlike most other devices, the /system file system in Micromax Funbook Pro isn't read-only making things simpler for us. Use adb push and copy the su binary to the device with the command adb push su /system/bin. Don't forget to set the permissions of the binary using chmod 4777 su.

2. Install the Superuser.apk from the system/app directory of the zip

Install the application using adb install or transfer the file to the sdcard and install it from there. The Superuser application intercepts the calls made to the su binary and informs the user about the usage so that unauthorized applications cannot attain root access.

Unrooting the Device

To unroot the device, uninstall the Superuser.apk and delete the su binary from the /system/bin directory.