Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Rooting Lenovo TAB 2 A7-20F on Linux

Lenovo TAB 2 A7-20F is a nice sturdy tablet that was very handy for me in the past to read the occasional article or ebook. However, it has been gathering up dust on my desk recently because it was slowing down. So I thought of giving it fresh life, removing the bloatware which came pre-installed with it.

In terms of specs, this comes with Android 4.4 (KitKat) and a Mediatek MT8127 chipset. Not stellar specs, but decent enough to get some work done. For rooting this, I was primarily looking for a way to do it using just a Linux laptop and a USB cable. So here are the steps I followed:
  • Do a hard reset of the tablet
    • For this, you need to restart the device to Bootloader by holding Volume up + Power keys when the tablet is starting. Then you'll come to this menu in Chinese.
      Chinese Bootloader menu of Lenovo TAB2 A7-20F
    • Here you need to select the clear eMMC (清除 eMMC) option by navigating to it via volume down key and selecting it via the power key.
  • Download SP Flash Tool for Linux from here
  • Then follow the steps in this XDA thread to install TWRP. (You'll have to run SP Flash Tool with root privileges.)
  • Copy the SuperSU zip to the tablet via USB.
  • Reboot the table to recovery mode by holding Volume up + Volume Down + Power keys when the tablet is starting. This should boot to TWRP.
  • Take a back up of system, data, and boot partitions via TWRP, just in case if you need to restore the stock ROM in the future.
  • While inside TWRP, install SuperSU by going to 'Install' -> 'Install ZIP' and selecting the copied SuperSU zip.
  • Now when you boot into the normal mode, you'll see SuperSU has been installed.
  • You can verify it by opening a terminal and typing su.
Success! Root access in Tab2 A7-20F
After this, I used Titanium Backup to freeze/uninstall the bloatware.

Here are some other threads if you plan on going beyond the new ROM and installing a new one.