The Real Guide To Rooting The Nexus 7

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I’ve looked over the Google results for rooting your Nexus7 and they are all a joke. None that I read would actually work on a Nexus7, so clearly the people posting are just looking for hits. Most of them were copypasta from one of 3 original guides. This is the real deal.

I got a Nexus7 yesterday, and I want to be able to share it with my wife. SwitchMe looks to be an awesome app that will let me do just that. I need to root this guy to run SwitchMe. So here we go.

I have Mac, so this guide is for command line, no other distractions. Get the SDK, expand it and set it up for 4.1.

Have your Nexus7 ready and be prepared to lose all data on it- don’t worry, Google will sync it back.

Overview

There are 2 steps:

1. Install the ClockworkMod Recovery Tool
2. Install the SuperSU script which give your apps the ability to execute root commands

1. Install ClockworkMod CWM

[cd into the SDK/s]

cd ~/android-sdk-macosx/platform-tools 

./adb reboot bootloader 

./fastboot oem unlock 

./fastboot reboot-bootloader 

cp ~/Downloads/CWM-grouper-recovery.img . 

./fastboot flash recovery CWM-grouper-recovery.img 

./fastboot reboot-bootloader

./adb shell 

    cd /system 

    mv recovery-from-boot.p recovery-from-boot.bak 

    exit

Install Rooter

./adb reboot recovery 

./adb shell ln -n -f -s /data/media /sdcard 

./adb push ~/Downloads/JB-SuperSU.zip /sdcard/JB-SuperSU.zip 

./adb shell ls -l /data/media 

* Verify that you see the JB-SuperSU.zip file

./adb reboot recovery

* Now navigate on the device and run the SuperSU.zip file.

 * choose Apply Zip file from SDCARD

 * Choose the SuperSU.zip file at the bottom (you may see a screen full of directories, ignore those)

 

After the SuperSU runs you should see this:

 

 

Finally, when you are sure it’s there and are ready to resume using the Nexus7:

./adb reboot

Make sure you reboot only when you are ready – you lose the dev usb setting and must go thru the whole setup and get back into settings and then re-enable the dev usb mode!

The tricky part was the re-linking of the /sdcard. The nexus7 has no physical sdcard, and the CMR wouldn’t read the JB-SuperSU.zip file if you just copied it onto /sdcard using adb. Only after reading this thread did I find the answer.

Now just go to the Play store (or install from this link) and install SwitchMe Root Profile Manager, and setup some profiles.

Files you need:

JB-SuperSU.zip

CWM-grouper-recovery.img