Can the galaxy s2 be rooted without increasing the custom flash counter using adb?

Question

Normally, rooting guides for the s2 involve flashing a kernel to the device to install busybox and su. This xda post suggests a method for doing so via adb (found approximately in the middle of the first post):

adb shell mount -o rw,remount /dev/block/mmcblk0p9 /system
adb push busybox /system/xbin/
adb push su /system/xbin/
adb shell chown root.shell /system/xbin/busybox
adb shell chown root.shell /system/xbin/su
adb shell chmod 755 /system/xbin/busybox
adb shell chmod 4755 /system/xbin/su
adb shell /system/xbin/busybox --install -s /system/xbin
adb shell mount -o ro,remount /dev/block/mmcblk0p9 /system

This also seems to be the method tools like SuperOneClick use. Now I recently found this blog post indicating the above method does not increment the hardware counter in the s2 that counts flashes of custom firmware. More than that, it can also be used to install ROMs via Mobile Odin, also without increasing the counter, because they come form the device itself and not from a computer via the USB cable.

I fear to try out myself and loose my precious counter value of still 0. Has anyone tried out a method like this before and can confirm that it really does not affect the counter?

Answer 1

You can make or buy a USB Jig for Samsung Galaxy S2 i9100. It’s a really simple circuit that involves putting 300K Ohms of resistors between pin 4 and 5 of the microUSB connector.

With a USB Jig you can reset the custom binary counter to zero and also remove the yellow triangle on start up if you have rooted your device.

• Turn off your phone completely and remove the battery for 10-15 seconds
• Put the battery back but don't switch on the device
• Plug the USB Jig into Micro USB port of your phone Wait for around 2-3 seconds
• You phone screen will show "ERASING DOWNLOAD INFORMATION SUCCEEDED" in ODIN mode and Custom Binary Download : No
• Now you can remove the battery and restart the phone.You will also notice that the yellow triangle which comes at start-up is gone now.

Answer 2

A little information for people that may not be aware. The counter in the SGS2 is there for Samsung to tell if you have flashed custom kernel / ROM on your SGS2. Samsung ships these devices with unlocked bootloaders, but being a company and need to protect themselves, if your counter is not 0 and you try to return your device under warranty, they will not honor the warranty.

Even if you can't flash without increasing the counter, there are ways that the counter can be reset. With that said, there is no guarantee that you will be able to reset the counter. Samsung may identify the way that people are using to reset it, and they may "change" it.