I was worried I’d borked my Asus slider earlier this week.

I’ve got the excellent SwitchMe app, which allows me to have different profiles for the different people who use the tablet. For it to work properly, you also need to have rooted the device. This is working very well.

However, this week Asus released a Firmware update, which refuses to install. It downloads fine, reboots the device… and then says the update is available again.

So I thought, perhaps it’s because I’d rooted the device. So I temporarily unrooted using OTA RootKeeper. Bad idea – when it rebooted, I was completely locked out. The lock screen refused to go away. Fortunately I could get in via adb shell, and tried various things to turn off the lock screen, or get root back – no joy.

Just before I decided I’d have to do some sort of emergency recovery process, I discovered sfink’s page about how to get root back! What a hero.

The steps were:

  1. adb shell
  2. cd /system
  3. ./usr/we-need-root/su-backup
  4. mount # to see device of /system
  5. mount -w -o remount (device) /system
  6. cp usr/we-need-root/su-backup xbin/su
  7. mount -r -o remount (device) /system

I rebooted, SwitchMe was working properly again, and I was in.

Still haven’t got to the bottom of why the Firmware won’t install though…