Rooting a cheap chinese tablet (Denver TAD-70111)

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Category: Completed
Published on Thursday, 20 November 2014 17:31

denver TAD_70111Denver TAD_70111A few days ago i bought a cheap android tablet. It was a "Denver TAD 70111". It sported 4gb of hdd, 512mb RAM as well as a 7 inch screen and Wifi connection. All for the price of DKK300 (aprox $50).

I bought one and tested it. I was quite impressed with the amount of tablet you got for the money. Only problem was that I could not get the adb-link to function properly.
Therefore I could not install homebrew software or even gain root.

Denver (which is a Danish company) does not have any hardware development themselves, so the tablet was likely a cheap rebranded chinese version. In any case Denver was not inclined to help me troubleshoot the adb link.

So I began trying...

Well, in Windows not much luck. It was next to impossible to find the driver. Especially when you have not go a clue as to what brand of tablet you really have.

So I tried Ubuntu....

Well, the first step is to figure out what kind of device you have

  • Enable USB debugging on device
  • To get the vendorid using lsusb command and dmesg.

deviceidDevice IdIn my case, I did not get anything using lsusb, but got a it from dmesg (see screenshot). Googling a bit revealed that the vendorcode "10d6" belongs to "Actions Semiconductor Co. Ltd" - which is one of the companies making these cheap tablets.

Next step is to install the Android SDK, as described here: Go here!

The odds of Linux not being able to communicate with your device is close to nill. It probably just won't.

Remember to add rule to your udev file and enforce it like this:

 

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/51-android.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="18d1", MODE="0666"

 

after this run the following commands in order to reload udev rules

 

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

sudo service udev restart

 

After this, ubuntu should list the device if you do a lsusb

The android environment, does, however, need to access it as well.

Therefore add the vendorid and the productid on a line in the android debug bridge usb permission file like this:

sudo nano /home/(username)/.android/adb_usb.ini or sudo gedit /home/(username)/.android/adb_usb.ini

0x10d6

0x0c02

There may be a few others in the file. Googles vendorid is likely to be there intially.

After this, you can run:

adb services

 

This gave me the answer:

 

Device NameDevice Name

List of devices attached
0123456789ABCDEF device

 
Note that the chinese vendor has not even bothered giving the device a proper name....tsk, tsk...
 
After here, it is pretty much a straight forward process to copy the SuperUser.apk and su binary to the device and setting the permissions.
 
First get the files you need. They are included in this file (for Android 4.1x and 4.2x)
 
Then copy:
  1. adb Install Superuser.apk
  2. adb install Root\ Checker.apk
  3. adb push busybox /sdcard/
  4. adb push su /sdcard/
Then enter the device using adb shell, and write:
su - to become superuser. Then write:
  1. mount -o remount,rw /system
  2. mv /system/xbin/su /system/xbin/oldsu
  3. cp /sdcard/busybox /system/bin/busybox
  4. cp /sdcard/su /system/bin/su
  5. chmod 06755 /system/bin/su
  6. chmod 0755 /system/bin/busybox
  7. ln -s /system/bin/su /system/xbin/su
  8. rm /sdcard/su
  9. rm /sdcard/busybox
  10. exit su (may say something about a bad number
  11. exit
  12. adb reboot
... And thats it. You have a rooted tablet. Enjoy
 
Finally RootedFinally RootedYou can verify that you have root using the previously installed rootchecker as shown in the image.