Verizon Galaxy S3 Finally Gets Root and Recovery Access [TUTORIAL]

How to root Verizon's Galaxy S3 with unsigned bootloader

Samsung Galaxy S3 — There are areas that can be improved if the Korea-based company is working on the successor or the Galaxy S4. Samsung

Verizon's Galaxy S3 finally gets its due with the formulation of a complete root and recovery procedure, after some of its users expressed concerns with the phone being locked out by the cellular service provider. This comes as a big jolt, given the fact that Samsung has not locked any of its devices in recent times. Verizon users are peeved that the security lock prevented them from gaining root access to the device, which holds the key to many hidden features of the device.

XDA Senior Member AdamLange was the first to shed some light on the issue with failed attempts at flashing the insecure kernel via Odin. The numerous failed attempts led AdamLange and his team members conclude that Verizon had indeed inserted a security check to prevent unsigned boot and recovery images from being flashed over Odin. As this is the regular method used for rooting other Samsung Galaxy S3 devices, it poses a huge problem to hack tool developers.

Meanwhile, another renowned XDA developer incubus26jc has gone a step ahead by filing a petition thread, while AdamLange and his elite team have finally unearthed the rooting and recovery procedure for the beleaguered Verizon S3 model.

According to veteran hack tool developer invisiblek, you should note a couple of key points before you begin the rooting procedure. They are as follows:

If in case you decide to halt the rooting procedure in the middle or something goes wrong, you can always recover your earlier device status by flashing the stock ROM (extract the .tar.md5 from the zip) using Odin in your bootloader. The latest stock ROMs for Verizon Galaxy S3 can be downloaded here.
Do not proceed with the hack if you have disabled apps. Re-enable the apps first or run the stock ruu downloaded from the above link, before rooting.

Things You Will Need to Download

This basically flashes a custom system.img.ext4 which has your su binary. You can then boot up and flash cwm.

1) USB Drivers: http://tinyw.in/Fdoz

2) Odin: http://samsung-updates.com/Odin307.zip

3) One Rooted system.img tarball:

Download the stripped down version from here: http://goo.im/devs/invisiblek/i535/s...mg.tar.md5.zip

OR

Download the stock version here: http://goo.im/devs/invisiblek/i535/r...system.img.tar (this is big ~1.5gb)

4) Download CWM recovery.img file here: http://goo.im/devs/invisiblek/i535/recovery.img

Now, we are ready to kick start the rooting procedure on your favourite Galaxy smartphone from Verizon.

1. Boot into Odin mode on the phone. Do this by powering off and then holding vol down, home and power to power on. Then press vol up to accept the disclaimer. Plug into your computer.

2. Fire up Odin (Heimdeil may work in linux, haven't tested) choose the PDA section and browse to wherever you downloaded rooted.system.img.tar then click flash. This takes awhile, be patient. It takes roughly around 8 minutes to flash this.

3. It will now auto reboot. It should boot up and thing should function normal except that you'll be able to adb in and use su to take root

If you do not want a custom recovery, you may stop here. You are rooted.

Continue with next step to get CyanogenWorkMod (CWM) on your device...

4. You'll need adb installed and working for this. If you don't know how, this isn't the thread for that. Open a command prompt and enter these commands:

Code: