The new second generation Amazon Fire TV, released only a month ago, has been rooted for the first time. XDA forum member zeroepoch has successfully developed a hardware rooting method to be the first one to root the new Fire TV. Similar to the hardware rooting method which has been used to root the 1st-gen Fire TV and the Fire TV Stick, this rooting method invloves soldering wires directly to the Fire TV’s circuit board, to directly access the eMMC storage chip, in order to modify the device’s file system. Not many people will be proficient and/or brave enough to use this method since one can easily ruin their Fire TV, which zeroepoch did himself when he fried his first Fire TV. For the brave among you, zeroepoch says he’ll be packaging up his scripts and releasing all the details of his rooting method soon. This method is currently very specific to software version 5.0.3.1, so if you want to use his scripts unmodified, you should update your Fire TV to software version 5.0.3.1, which is currently the latest version, and then block software updates.

I’ve been in contact with zeroepoch and he has been able to extract his complete boot image, and has sent it my way. A complete boot image is necessary to try to replicate the new Fire tablet software rooting method with the 2nd-gen Fire TV. My initial experiments have not been promising, since I’ve been unable to boot the 2nd-gen Fire TV using zeroepoch’s unmodified boot image, which would be the first step to applying the Fire tablet’s rooting method to the Fire TV 2. It’s still early days, so once zeroepoch releases more details about his rooting method and the community gets their hands on his extracted images, we may see progress in software rooting the new Fire TV.

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