Amazon’s next-gen Kindle Fire HD may have hit the streets with a locked bootloader, yet modders quickly rooted the tablet, installed Google Play Store and even formluated a method for backing up and restoring system software – without having to perform a custom recovery.
And now custom recovery has arrived on the Kindle Fire HD, courtesy of Hashcode at XDA Developers.
“Safestrap is a Bootstrap/Recovery for locked bootloader phones,” Hashcode explained in a forum post.
“The goal is to avoid touching your primary system (I’ll call this ‘stock’ system) and only flash or make large changes to another place on your phone that Safestrap treats as a ‘2nd system’ (in this case, it’s a series of virtual ROM slots located on the internal emmc area: ‘/sdcard’).”
Although installation is considered relatively painless, Haschode does warn that Safestrap is considered a serious hack and could theoretically result in a soft brick if something goes wrong – so proceed at your own risk.
However, as Poorcollegeguy at XD Devs points out, this is definitely a milestone development for Kindle Fire HD users and will ultimately pave the way for modders to port CyanogenMod, AOKP, MIUI and other popular custom ROMs to Amazon’s latest tablet.
Interested? Full Safestrap details can be found here on the original forum thread, with a package available for download expected shortly.
According to Hashcode, the current delay can be attributed to a bug that occurs during the entry to recovery.
“What happens is the old init process is somehow still lingering long enough to trigger the ‘omap watchdog’ driver in the kernel. it’s a driver designed to reset the device when the process thinks it’s hung up,” he confirmed on November 8.
“Turns out we killed the old init process off on purpose, so that we can re-start it with new rootfs files. But, that doesn’t change the fact that recovery reboots about 20 seconds after you enter… I’m tinkering with various solutions atm.”
So here’s to hoping a public release of the hack is imminent!
