The big thread of How-Tos

[Laura]

i have tons of info to post so i figured out it’d be better to make a single thread and enclose all information in it.
Warning: do not connect external powered hubs/hdds to the keyboard dock, there have been reports of it being damaged by that

 
Backing up your system

1. boot into windows
2. install macrium reflect (http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx)
3. open reflect
4. select the eMMc disk
5. click “image this disk”
6. choose the destination folder, obviously it will have to be on an external drive
7. follow the wizard to the end

please note that no matter what backup software you use, if you restore the entire disk image (specifically, the android partitions) android will NOT boot anymore. This is because Cube (or rather, their ODM) enabled dm-verity so the system detects that it has been “tampered” and  just hangs at boot. to fix that you should reflash the official android image with the files provided by Cube, or use a modified boot.img (see rooting section)

Entering Bootloader (and recovery) mode

1. power off the tablet
2. turn on the tablet, at the OS selection screen select android and OK
3. as soon as you clicked OK and the screen turns black, press and HOLD volume down
4. release vol- when you see the recovery popping up

Entering DNX mode

1. shut down the tablet
2. Press and HOLD volume down, volume up and power.
3. hold until you see the DNX mode message

if you still can’t access DNX mode, power up the tablet, choose Android and as soon as the screen goes black press and hold vol- AND vol+

Booting a Linux Mint usb drive

1. create the drive using the ISO image, use MBR as partition table (if you use Rufus, choose MBR for UEFI)
2. at boot selection choose WINDOWS
3. as soon as you chose Windows, spam the ESC key
4. in the bios, go to the last tab (boot override) and select your usb drive (will be UEFI: yourusbdrive) and press ENTER
5. when the Mint boot menu pops up, press E (just the e key, not capital)
6. in the lines that appear, replace the “quiet splash” text with “nomodeset” (no quotes)
7. you may have to hold down Fn key while typing if you’re using the Cube original dock keyboard
8. press F10

Creating a WinPe usb drive

this one is not directly related to the tablet but it’s a key tool for fiddling with it

 

1. download Win8Pe (http://w8pese.cwcodes.net/Compressed/index.php)
2. alternatively, you can download Win10PE (http://win10se.cwcodes.net/Compressed/)
3. get yourself win8 or win10 ISO, you may have to get one specifically compatible with win8pe/win10pe, instructions are included in the respective software
4. extract the win8pe zip in a root directory of the hard drive (c:, d:, etc)
5. make sure the folder that you extract it to has a very short name (like win8pe)
6. extract your windows ISO somewhere you want, again, make sure it has a short path (like d:\win8iso). you can use 7zip for that
7. launch builderse.exe
8. click Source, as source directory choose the one you have extracted the ISO content into
9. click Script, for build model select “normal”, dismiss the error message
10. for boot manager select “auto”
11. select “components” from the list to the left
12. check the following:  directx11, .net framework, internet explorer, ms visual c++, Vss
13. select Tweaks from the list to the left
14. UNcheck ImDisk
15. select Finals from the list to the left
16. UNcheck “create iso”
17. click Play button in the top right corner
18. get a usb drive, 8GB+, format it FAT32
19. copy all the files in Win8PE\Target\Win8PESE to the root of the usb drive
20. download BootIce (http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/bootice.html)
21. launch it
22. select your USB drive as “destination disk”
23. click “process MBR” , select Windows NT 5.x/6.x
24. click install/config
25. click Windows NT 6.x
26. click close
27. click Process PBR
28. select BOOTMGR and click Install/config
29. click Parts Manage
30. select the partition (should be only one) and click Activate
31. click close
32. go into the BCD edit tab
33. select Other BCD file
34. open E:\Boot\BCD (where E: is the letter of your usb drive)
35. click Easy mode
36. select “partition” radio button
37. select your usb drive as “disk”
38. select the partiton as “partition”
39. check the Test Mode box down below
40. click save current system
41. close
42. repeat step 33-41 for the file H:\efi\microsoft\boot\BCD
43. you can now boot your usb drive as a winpe environment

General guidelines to install your own windows and mantain proper dual boot

 

• back up your entire drive
• do a backup of the windows drivers using double driver, just in case
• go into c:\windows\inf and backup touchsetting.gt
• using a bootable drive (linux or winpe) delete all the windows partitions, they are the last 4 (system 100MB, microsoft special stuff 16MB, windows ~41GB, recovery ~1GB)
• install your windows
• using a bootable drive, resize your new windows partition down to something like 30GB, then back it up (only the C:)
• delete all the new partitions that were created by the installation
• take out the first image you did of the whole disk, restore partition 1,2,3 and the 4 original microsoft partition SAVE for the windows one (meaning you restore system, specialstuff, recovery)
• now restore your newly installed windows image into the blank space between specialstuff and recovery partitions
• resize the windows partition to fit
• now you must adjust the BCD files in the system partition to point to the new windows partition. i suggest doing that using bootice from a winpe usb drive. note that in order to see the system partition you must use diskpart to assign a drive letter to it
• when done, boot windows, install the drivers you backed up (or download them, cause double driver makes some mistakes)
• put the touchsetting.gt into windows\inf
• take out your first image backup of the disk, and copy the contents of c:\recovery to the c:\recovery of your new windows partition
• done

How to mount the SYSTEM windows partition

 

1. open an administrator command prompt
2. enter “diskpart” (without quotes)
3. enter “list disk”
4. look at which number is your emmc drive
5. enter “select disk #” where # is the number of your drive
6. enter “list partition”
7. enter “select partition #” where # is the number of the SYSTEM partition (should be 12)
8. enter “assign”
9. now the system partition is visible and accessible

 

Fixing Bosch Accelerometer issues (windows)

if you get the yellow triangle on bosch accelerometer or if you get the message “external backing provider not recognized” when trying to reinstall the driver, do this

1. go into device manager
2. right click bosch accelerometer under sensors
3. click uninstall
4. go into C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository there should be a directory named something like boschaccelerometer.inf_amd64_4158f2c511c66197
5. delete that
6. alternatively, open explorer and do a search for bosch* and delete all the files it finds
7. reboot

now you can reinstall the driver (manually) from device manager and it should work right off the bat

 

Flashing the tablet with stock Cube i15-TD images

see http://techtablets.com/forum/topic/tips-for-restoring-androidwin10-from-official-images/

 

Flashing a modified boot image (android)

 

before rooting, or if you restored a  backup image and android doesn’t boot anymore, you must flash a modified boot.img that disables some security checks. Be advised that by doing this you not only expose your system to more vulnerabilities but MOST LIKELY you will cut yourself off of firmware OTAs. i therefore STRONGLY DISCOURAGE doing this (and/or rooting) unless your model is i15-T or i15-TD because those have official images, while i15-TL DOES NOT.

BEFORE STARTING, CHECK YOUR KERNEL VERSION IN ANDROID, WRITE IT DOWN AND DOWNLOAD THE APPROPRIATE MODIFIED BOOT IMAGE FOR YOUR KERNEL. DO NOT FLASH BOOT IMAGES NOT CORRESPONDING TO YOUR KERNEL VERSION

1. boot tablet in fastboot mode (see other section)
2. connect the micro usb 2.0 port to your PC
3. install the intel phone flash tools, or alternatively https://01.org/android-ia/downloads/intel-platform-flash-tool-lite
4. open an elevated command prompt
5. type “fastboot device” (without quotes)
6. you should see your device listed
7. type “fastboot oem unlock”
8. type “fastboot flash boot yourbootimage.img” (where yourbootimage.img is the appropriate file .img for your model, see the downloads)
9. if it fails to flash you have issues with one of the first 3 partitions, most likely because you reinstalled windows on your own. you must restore the original 3 partitions.
10. using the vol and power keys select normal boot

 

Rooting

1. flash a modified boot image (see appropriate section)
2. download and unzip the iwork10root stuff
3. open an elevated command prompt (administrator)
4. navigate to the unzipped folder of the root stuff
5. turn on the tablet and boot to android
6. make sure USB debug is ENABLED, if not, enable it (google how, its really easy)
7. connect the micro usb 2.0 port to your pc
8. type “root.bat” in your command prompt
9. wait for it to hang on adb shell su –daemon
10. disconnect tablet, reboot it
11. supersu will want to update su binary, let it do so. it will fail, close it then.
12. reconnect the tablet, type “root.bat” again
13. should be rooted successfully.

 

Making your own modified boot.img

this is more of a guidance for power users rather than a foolproof guide, the procedure is quite long and has possible complications that you must be able to figure out on your own so i strongly advice you don’t try unless you know what you’re doing.

1. somehow, get the boot.img file or dump it from the tablet (dd) it’s the 3rd partition (30MB)
2. download android bootimg tools (wget http://android-serialport-api.googlecode.com/files/android_bootimg_tools.tar.gz)
3. extract using tar xvzf android_bootimg_tools.tar.gz
4. launch ./unpackbootimg -i -o
5. extract the ramdisk: gunzip -c boot.img-ramdisk.gz | cpio -i
6. mind that those 2 commands put all the files in the current directory, don’t mix things up, move your files to appropriate directories after each extraction
7. go to the ramdisk directory, open default.prop and change the ro.secure value from 1 to 0 (also make sure that ro.debuggable is set to 1), close and save
8. open init.rc , change user from media to root under the service media section, close and save
9. repack the ramdisk: find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip > ../newramdisk.cpio.gz
10. open the -cmdline file, copy content to clipboard
11. run: mkbootimg –cmdline ‘pasteyourclipboardhere’ –kernel your-kernel-file –ramdisk newramdisk.cpio.gz -o mynewimage.img
12. done

 

Downloads

https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!AEt5uW0vShObNiM&id=349D98B3AE35F242!112&cid=349D98B3AE35F242

• I15-TL 4-11-2016 6-46-35 PM.zip is the driver package from i15-TL. it’s fixed by hand cause driver double didnt backup everything correctly. it also cointains touchsetting.gt
• iwork10_Ultimate_Root_i15tl.zip is the package for rooting. note that you need the appropriate modified boot.img too
• rootbootT.img is the modified boot.img for i15-T(D) kernel version 3.14.37 built on mar 2 18:22:46 CST 2016
• rootbootTL.img is the modified boot.img for i15-TL kernel version 3.14.37 built on mar 16 09:47:51 CST 2016

that’s all for now, have fun

[Laura]

reserved

[Thomas Schmid]

Wow cool, thanks. Does this mean a pure Android is possible?

Beam me up Scotty

[Laura]

Thomas Schmid wrote:

Wow cool, thanks. Does this mean a pure Android is possible?

yeah i guess so. probably have to delete win partitions, resize android userdata and flash modified bootimage to bypass dm-verity

[Laura]

done, phew it was a lot of work. @Chris can you please make this sticky?

[Pascal Zinken]

Hi

Tanks for this topic.

I have a Cube iworks 10 flagship dual os (i15-tl)
Just to Be sure…do you have the link to the official images for Windows and android….i saw them on the cube site but i cant read Chinese and the translater doesnt translate the images that explain How to do It.
Could you explain ?
There is nothing wrong but i want to know if It does go wrong.

Hope you can help

Greetings

[Laura]

the link on the cube site is for a zip that contains a link for a baidu share that no longer exists. i believe somebody around here made a mirror of that, but can’t remember which post had it inside

as for the guide to restore the system from the images, look at my other thread for tips about restoring, its linked there

[Abady]

Does reflashing the android partition requires me to also reflash windows? Or is there a workaround for that?

I plan to root mine, but I’m afraid if it get’s an update I’ll have to reflash the whole tablet to update it, I wouldn’t mind reflashing just the android partition because I mostly use windows.

[Laura]

can’t know for sure but there is a very high chance that in order to get the OTA you’ll have to re-flash using the intel phone tool which erases the whole disk including the windows partitions.

let’s say that atleast you can backup the windows partitions and restore them after, that you can do

[Abady]

yeah that’s a good idea

 

Edit: tried to flash the modified boot image and got an error! Even though the last thing I did is flash the official images!!

 

Do I need to restore the partitions? And which ones are they? I have “bootloader2” and “bootloader” -100mb each-, and “boot” which is 30mb. Are those the ones I need to restore?

Edit 2:
Nevermind, just restored them and rooted successfully.

Thanks.

[Frederic]

Now that’s a good bit of useful info, appreciate the effort!

Will have to see about trying out the root sometime soon.

[Chris G]

@lalla521 Well done, great thread. I have stuck it to the forum!

Chris | Admin
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[Thanasis]

So… in order to get a working custom boot image, you unpack it, make the changes to default.prop and init.rc and repack right?

[Laura]

yes

[E]

Hi Laura,

thanks for all the really great info.

I’ve just a question regarding “General guidelines to install your own windows and mantain proper dual boot” – what happens if you just install Windows and don’t do the messing around restoring original partitions and so on? What parts of the dual boot system don’t work properly without this?

[Author]

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