How to Root your Nexus 7

It's been with us since last Thursday.... Of course it was Rooted day one!

UPDATE 22/7/12 - Official ClockworkMod Recovery available, read on for details

It seems that the Nexus 7 will be arriving to peoples doorsteps at any minute, with shipping having already started on select pre-orders. Users after our own hearts here at AndroidNZ will no doubt be wondering how they can Root the device as soon as it comes out of the box, and like usual we're here to tell you how to do it. Make to jump to see how to makes your Nexus 7 truly yours...

Before we get down into the nitty-gritty of the guide itself you should familiarise yourself with our usual disclaimers at the beginning of this post. I say this not because we don't care if you have problems, it's just that our capacity to trouble shoot is limited, and you shouldn't have embarked on an adventure to Root your device unless you did your due diligence first and had some understanding of what you were up to.

Disclaimers out of the way, here are the things you will need:

• A Nexus 7, fully charged
• A windows PC (the guide may work on macs via Windows virtual environments, but that isn't confirmed by us and is outside the scope of this guide)
• The appropriate Nexus 7 USB drivers, there are several ways to get these:
• Preferred method - Go to this thread at XDA-Developers and download and install the Root Toolkit there, which has an automated drivers installation included (this is preferred because it is what the guide that follows is based on because the Toolkit is probably going to be the most straightforward for the majority to use, and even if it fails and they have to resort to using command prompts that is more easily done from the Toolkit). Many many thanks to WugFresh at XDA for producing such a noob-friendly Rooting application - please consider making a donation to him here.
• Install the Android SDK from here. Please note if you are already an SDK user that the Google USB drivers in the SDK have updated with the release of the Nexus 7 and Jelly Bean and you should update your drivers from within the SDK itself
• Install the universal drivers from this post at XDA-Developers, but please make note of how you will need to adjust fastboot commands if you are using these drivers
• Go to this post at XDA-Developers and install the USB drivers from there if you have no luck whatsover with any of the other methods

OK, now that you've got the Root Toolkit let's proceed (if you plan to do this with the SDK and command prompts then you should be advanced enough to follow the guide here, I did the first time and if you've done this stuff before the process is trivial).

1. Open the Root Toolkit, at the prompt to select your device scroll down to the bottom and select the Nexus 7 and the version number that corresponds to the firmware installed on your Nexus 7 (you can find this out in Settings --> About tablet --> Android version)





2. You'll be greeted with a screen that looks like this:





3. Click on Initial Setup and use the automatic driver installation facility from here to install USB drivers, it will check that ADB and Fastboot commands are working before dropping you back to the install window.
4. Turn on USB Debugging in the Nexus 7 by navigating to Settings --> Developer options. Turn on Developer options using the toggle in the top right hand corner, and then turn on USB debugging








Connect your Nexus 7 to your computer with the micro USB cable that came in the box. At this point it is vital that your computer recognises the Nexus 7 as a connected device, you will know if it has because a Nexus 7 "AutoPlay" window should pop up and ask you what action you want to take. If it doesn't show up, pull down the notification tray and press on the notification that says "Connected as a media device". A new menu will open and select the "Camera (PTP)" option. You should now get the AutoPlay window.








Head back to the Toolkit, and select "Unlock" from here, be aware that this will wipe your device (you might want to take a backup if you've already installed a lot of stuff on the device, that's just a button click away also in the Toolkit)
This will boot the device up to a screen giving you the option to unlock the bootloader, with "Yes" selected hit the power button. You'll see some text in the top left corner telling you it is unlocking the device, and then you will see the red "Locked" text toward the bottom of the screen change to "Unlocked". Moments later the device will reboot, and because it will have been wiped you will need to either set it up again or just skip past set-up and get back to the homescreen.








Once you're back onto the home screen, connect as you did before and take the same steps to turn on USB debugging and get the AutoPlay prompt to appear. Then go back to the Toolkit and select the Root option with permanent CWM recovery. All things going well the process will be fully automated from here, it will check that ADB and Fastboot are working, push the SU and CWM files to the device, boot the Nexus 7 into it's bootloader, flash CWM recovery to the device, and then reboot with Root privileges and a fresh new recovery permanently installed.
...or so the theory goes. Using this method I get Root, but CWM recovery is only accessible via command prompt, and I see others having the same problem. So...

UPDATE 22/7/12 - Official ClockworkMod Recovery available

There is now an official CWM Recovery available from the developer Koush. You can easily install it just by getting ROM Manager from the Play Store. The free version is here, while the paid version ($7.99 NZD) is here.

Once you have installed ROM Manager, open it up and select Flash ClockworkMod Recovery as shown in the screenshot below.

Once installed you can easily boot into CWM Recovery just by going into ROM Manager and selecting Reboot into Recovery or by using the methods mentioned earlier. Currently there is a bug that prevents accessing recovery from the bootloader (accessed by Power + Vol Down when device is turned off).

This next bit is our now-deprecated part of the guide about how to access CWM recovery from a command prompt using the Root Toolkit. We've left it here in the guide on the outside chance that some of you out there might want a gentle intro into using command prompts with Android

1. In the Root toolkit go to Advanced Utilities by launching it here:








On the next screen select Launch CMD Prompt:








Once the command prompt appears type: ADB reboot recovery - the phone will boot into CWM recovery for you, so you can do things like make Nandroid backups, install zip files and so forth

Installing the 4.1.1 update post-Root and installation of CWM recovery:

1. Install OTA Rootkeeper by Supercurio from the Play Store here
2. Open the app once installed and grant it SuperUser privileges
3. In the app select "Protect Root", and then "temp unroot" the device
4. Download a zip of the 4.1.1 update here.
5. Copy it to the internal SD of the Nexus 7
6. Access CWM recovery. In this version of CWM recovery you will navigate the options with the volume keys and press the power button to select an option - do that to navigate to "Install zip from SD card" and press the home button





7. On the next screen go to down "Toggle signature verification" and toggle it until it says "disabled" at the bottom of the screen (it should be set to default to disabled, but you lose like 5s making sure)





8. Go up to install zip, navigate to the zip file you downloaded in step one and install it





9. When the device reboots go to OTA Rootkeeper and restore Root, viola! You're done!
10. Future updates will be able to manually installed in exactly the same fashion.

So, after all is said and done you should have a Rooted Nexus 7, running the 4.1.1 update, and with a custom recovery that can only be accessed via command prompt. Don't forget to shout WugFresh, the Toolkits developer, a coffee - make a donation here.

If this guide helped you feel free to let the world know about your adoration in the comments below, and make sure to share it around your social media (we're a small blog and every little bit helps!). If there are points you still feel fuzzy on feel free to let us know about those and how we might tighten the guide up too.