Root the Zopo ZP980 / C2 Android phone using adb

Rooting the Zopo C2/ZP980 device requires the execution of a local executable that grants you root access to the phone.

The procedure here depicts using Fedora for rooting the phone; to do the same on Windows or on another platform make sure to have appropriate drivers and adb (Android Debug Bridge) installed. The procedure is much more simple than most people try to do and it does not involve shitty Windows graphical programs and a plethora of different tools installed on the phone.

Install Android tools on the system

Super easy task for Fedora:

yum -y install android-tools

Enable USB debugging on the system

To enable the development menu, go to System Settings, About Phone and tap repeatedly the Android version field. A new menu under System Settings called Developer Options should appear.

Under Developer Options flag USB debugging.

Download the hack

Download the Galaxy S4 hack from here unpack it somewhere. Original hack with a lot of files can be downloaded from RootzWiki; but most of the files are not needed.

Getting root access.

Connect the phone to the USB cable, make sure the phone is NOT in USB mass storage mode (MTP or CDROM work fine) and launch the following commands from the folder where you unpacked the previous archive:

adb push su /data/local/tmp/
adb push pwn /data/local/tmp/

Then launch a shell on the phone:

adb shell

And then these commands:

cd /data/local/tmp
chmod 0755 ./pwn
./pwn
mount -o rw,remount /emmc@android /system
cp su /system/bin/
chmod 6755 /system/bin/su
cp su /system/xbin/
chmod 6755 /system/xbin/su
mount -o ro,remount /emmc@android /system

VoilĂ , the phone is rooted. Make sure to install any Superuser app from the Play Store. My preference is for the Superuser app from the Clockworkmod / RomManager developer.

Now you can replace the super ugly boot animation and logo. Just make sure to delete or replace the following files:

/system/media/bootanimation.zip
/system/media/bootaudio.mp3

I’ve prepared a custom boot animation that only prints the Zopo logo without the stupid music and the animation. It takes less time to boot and is much more sober. You can download it here.

Installing ClockWorkMod Recovery

Again this does not involve Windows graphical programs, a plethora of different tools, etc. you just need to download the file and overwrite a specific partition on the flash. Too simple, huh?

First of all download the custom ClockWorkMod recovery from here and unpack it somewhere; then push the recover image file to the SD card:

adb push recovery.img /storage/sdcard0/

After this launch a shell on the phone:

adb shell

And then flash the recovery partition:

shell@android:/ $ su
shell@android:/ # dd if=/storage/sdcard0/recovery.img of=/dev/recovery
shell@android:/ # exit
shell@android:/ $ exit

After this, just reboot into your new recovery image.

adb reboot recovery

Plase note, that after flashing a custom recovery image you can not apply Off the Air (OTA) updates anymore. The wireless update creates files that are not compatible with the custom recovery image, even if you attempt to manually flash them.

To revert back to the original custom recovery image, download your original firmware from the Zopo website and use the above procedure to flash the original recovery,img image.