Install TWRP Recovery and Root Galaxy A9 Pro A910/A9100

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Samsung has a handful of nice devices in the Galaxy A lineup and the Galaxy A9 Pro is one of them. Just as its name suggests, this device equips some top-notch hardware specifications. The Galaxy A9 Pro touts a huge 6-inch Super AMOLED display and has a resolution of 1080p. Gorilla Glass protects this phone on its front and the back. Samsung has powered it up using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 652 CPU accompanied by Adreno 510 GPU and a RAM of 4 GB. Internal storage is 32 GB but the device also supports external SD cards of up to 256 GB. Galaxy A9 has a 16 MP camera at its back and an 8 MP shooter on the front. The device is a powerhouse when it comes to battery. It has a monstrous 5000 mAh battery under the hood. It runs on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow out of the box.

Galaxy A9 Pro

While these specifications make this phone a pure beast, it will be a great injustice if you own it and you are unable to unleash its true power. Making the best out of your device begins right when you root it and bring in a custom recovery like the TWRP recovery. Luckily, both the aforementioned mechanisms are available for the Galaxy A9 Pro SM-A910F and the Chinese variant A9100.

Thanks to XDA member Ashyx, who has always worked hard to bring up the custom recoveries a number of devices. His TWRP recovery builds for the Galaxy A9 Pro work pretty well. You can flash the recovery on your device on whatever Marshmallow build it is running. After flashing the TWRP recovery, you can flash the SuperSU and root the phone as well.

To disable forced encryption, users have to flash a dm-verity.zip file in order to make the recovery mount your internal storage. The process is slightly trick once you flash the TWRP recovery. In order to make everything go plain smooth, you have to follow the instructions with all eyes open. Make sure you are ready to do this and then let’s take a swing through the process to install TWRP recovery and root Galaxy A9 Pro A910/A9100.

Important instructions that you must follow before going ahead

  • This tutorial will only work for Galaxy A9 Pro SM-A910 and the Chinese variant SM-A9100.
  • Charge your phone up to 50% to avoid power issues during the process.
  • Backup everything on your phone as the process involves going through a data wipe.
  • Use OEM data cable to connect your phone to your PC.
  • Galaxy A9 Pro SM-A9100 owners need to unlock the bootloader of their device first.
  • Disable reactivation lock and find my mobile as well using settings > security.
  • Enable OEM Unlocking and USB debugging mode on your phone.
  • Get a micro SD card or a USB OTG as we will need to copy some files to it.

Files you need to download:

  1. Install Samsung USB drivers on your PC.
  2. Download Odin 3.11.1 on your PC and extract it to get Odin3.exe.
  3. Download TWRP Recovery for Galaxy A9 Pro A910/A9100: twrp_3.0.2-1_sm-a910_a9100_7217
  4. Download SuperSU.zip and DM-Verity file and copy these files to an external SD card or a USB OTG.

How to Install TWRP Custom Recovery and Root Galaxy A9 Pro SM-A910/A9100

  1. Open Odin3.exe file from the extracted Odin files that you downloaded above.
  2. Put your Galaxy A9 Pro in download mode now. To do so, turn off your phone first. Now turn it on by pressing and holding Volume Down + Power + Home button. As soon as your device boots up showing a Downloading screen, leave the keys.
  3. Connect your phone to your PC now. Odin should show an “Added” message in the logs and also show the blue light in the ID:COM box. This will verify a successful connection between your phone and your PC.
  4. Now click on the “AP” tab in Odin and select the TWRP Recovery.img.tar file according to your device carefully.
  5. The options ticked in Odin should be only “F.Reset Time“. Make sure that the Auto-Reboot option is not checked, we do not want to reboot the phone after flashing TWRP recovery.
  6. After selecting the file and checking/unchecking the options carefully, hit the start button. Odin will now flash the TWRP and show you a PASS message in a few minutes.
  7. Once done, disconnect your device from your PC now. Do not reboot your device.

Root and disable forced encryption

  1. Now you need to boot directly into TWRP Recovery. Turn off your phone completely and turn it on by pressing and holding Volume Up + Home + Power key now. Your phone should successfully boot into newly installed custom recovery.
  2. TWRP will ask you whether you want to allow modifications or not, you will need to swipe finger to the right to enable modifications. Swiping the finger to right will trigger dm-verity, if you will need to disable it immediately. Leaving it enabled will not let you boot the phone neither root it. This is an important stuff since we want to be able to modify the system.
  3. Now tap “Wipe > Format Data > type “yes” to format data. This is important to disable encryption. This step will factory reset your phone, so make sure that you’ve backed up the entire data at hand.
  4. Now make sure that you’ve copied the SuperSU.zip and dm-verity.zip files in external SD Card or USB OTG, if not then transfer both these files to your external SD Card by using MTP mode in TWRP now.
  5. Once you’ve the files, tap “Install > locate the SuperSU.zip according to the location where you copied > flash it”.
  6. Now once again tap “Install > locate the dm-verity.zip file > flash it”.
  7. Once done flashing, reboot your phone to system.
  8. That’s all. You’re rooted and have a TWRP recovery installed. Best of luck.

Let me know if I can help you guys any further. That’s all for now.

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Usama is a software engineer by profession and at TechBeasts.com he uses his expertise to solve everyday consumer tech problems with his main areas of interest being Android, iOS and Windows.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Is there also a Custom rom available for the A9100 Chinese model? Iam looking for a rom without the chinese samsung bloatware.

    Cheers,

    Tom

  2. I do it, but how can i return to original?. I wanted to install gapps but it doesn’t work.
    I prefer the previous.
    Thanks,
    Marino

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