For reasons that will not be expanded upon, I found myself in possession of an Asus Android tablet running an environment locked down by some horrible 3rd party software called SureLock MDM; it’s a hack that is supposed to stop you running non approved software. As it happens I did actually want to run the approved software, but the locked down environment was so obnoxious I couldn’t bear to use it without opening it up a little: they had even disabled the Android status bar and soft-buttons – ugh. Here are some rough notes that may prove helpful if you find yourself in the same position.<\/p>\n
Fortunately the tablet is based around a MediaTek chip (MT8125) which means you can use the widely available SP FlashTool<\/a> to reflash your device without worrying about all those pesky things like operating systems and code signing getting in the way. The bootloader menu will appear if you power-up while holding volume-up. It has a built in recovery mode that allows you to factory reset etc, but no upgrades. It also has a fastboot mode. When a fully charged tablet is switched off, you can plug it into a computer and then for a few seconds the USB interface will come alive, presenting itself with the VID\/PID of 0x0e8d\/0x2000. This will be picked-up by Windows (providing you installed the driver) as “PreLoader USB VCOM Port”. SP FlashTool will grab it as soon as it appears and can then begin reflashing. <\/p>\n To get the USB shenanigans done I had to add a USB filter to VirtualBox:all that was need was to set the filter’s Vendor ID to 0e8d – the device showed up immediately. <\/p>\n Everything, including the Bootloader can be flashed and this allowed me to unlock the bootloader.<\/p>\n The original bootloader had a fastboot mode, but my original firmware gave me a security error whenever I tried to flash anything. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Overview For reasons that will not be expanded upon, I found myself in possession of an Asus Android tablet running an environment locked down by some horrible 3rd party software called SureLock MDM; it’s a hack that is supposed to stop you running non approved software. As it happens I did actually want to run […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":1029,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1031","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1041,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1031\/revisions\/1041"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nUnfortunately the procedure is a bit hairy and there appear to be many version of the software about that behave differently.
\nFortunately, all you need to know is on the relevant forums of xda-developers<\/a>.
\nUnfortunately this software only runs on Winblows and I refuse to allow MS software to run in my house unless it’s running in a nice safe VM.
\nFortunately I can confirm it runs happily (well, as happily as it can) in VirtualBox on a Mac, and therefore presumably on Linux. <\/p>\n
\nUnfortunately the bootloader is locked so that you cant install unsigned images.<\/p>\n