With three US Variants of the flagship Samsung device being rooted so early, several expected the Verizon Galaxy S III to be rooted as easily and by the same method employed for the other three (Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T models). This was not to be the case unfortunately. Verizon angered several users who expected the device to be easily rooted by locking down the device. Since Samsung does not normally lock devices and has no way to profit by locking down the Verizon model, it is clear that the culprit here is the carrier itself. Incidentally, Verizon is the only carrier that felt the need to do this and Verizon users were understandable furious about this.
The first three US variants mentioned above were all rooted in a similar fashion by Odin flashing an insecure kernel and the following this up with flashing custom recovery and Superuser. You can read the method and step-by-step directions here. The Verizon model cannot be rooted this way. However, the good thing is that developers have once again rendered the device lockdown useless. Only a few hours after initially discovering that the normal root method won’t work due to a security check’s implementation that made it impossible flash unsigned boot and recovery images, the amazing devs over at XDA pulled through and provided a root solution.
The process is simple enough if you are familiar with Odin. However, to install CWM you need to have a slight knowledge of ADB and command line use. If you don’t feel comfortable with that you can choose to wait a little of course. Good things come to those who do and someone may come up with a much simpler way of obtaining root on the Verizon Galaxy S III.
The Verizon model hasn’t even hit its stores yet. However, pre-ordered units have started being received. The device will hit Verizon stores and online on the 10th of July.
At any point during the directions given below, you can flash the stock ROM by extracting the .tar.md5 from the zip, using Odin in your bootloader if you no longer wish to proceed or are not comfortable with the difficulty level. Head over to this thread to do so.
Pre-requisites:
To start with, you’ll require some files. This will essentially flash a custom system.img.ext4 which has your su binary. After this, you can then boot up and flash CWM.
1. Odin: http://samsung-updates.com/Odin307.zip
2. One Rooted system.img tarball:
Stripped down (unzip first)
http://goo.im/devs/i…img.tar.md5.zip
Torrent: http://goo.im/devs/i…rom.zip.torrent
OR
Full Stock, rooted:
http://goo.im/devs/i….system.img.tar (This is a 1.5 GB file)
Torrent: http://goo.im/devs/i…img.tar.torrent
Mirror: http://tinyurl.com/tytillithz
3. CWM recovery.img: http://goo.im/devs/i…35/recovery.img (this was ripped out of CWM-Recovery-LTE-SGS3-Sprint-v4.zip from the e4gt team)
Instructions:
Step 1: Boot into Odin mode on your Verizon Galaxy S III. To do this, first power off your device and then hold the volume down, home and power to power on. Then press the volume up to accept the disclaimer. Plug it into your computer.
Step 2: Fire up Odin (Heimdeil may work in Linux, this has not been tested by the developer), choose the PDA section and browse to wherever you downloaded rooted.system.img.tar. Next, click flash. This takes a while, be patient. It may take around ten minutes, don’t think it is not working.
Step 3: It will auto reboot. It should boot up and things should act mostly normal except that you’ll be able to ADB in and use su to take root.
If you don’t want a custom recovery, you may stop here. Your device is now successfully rooted.
If you also wish to get CWM on your device, continue.
Step 4: You’ll need ADB installed and working for this. Open a command prompt and follow these commands:
<cd to the directory with the files you downloaded earlier>
adb push recovery.img /sdcard/
adb shell
su
dd if=/sdcard/recovery.img of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p18
adb reboot recovery
Step 5: Profit.
That’s all. Head over to the source link for more information on this.
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