How To Flash Lenovo P780 Stock ROM With IMEI and OTA Updates Working

Once upon time, one of my tweeps mentioned he was done rooting his android devices as it was just a waste of data, energy, time etc and I told him I would be rooting my devices for life as rooting was the way to go. Well, over the weekend, for some reason I decide to analyze the necessity of root on my Lenovo P780 which is currently running Android KitKat with VibeUI 1.5 and I couldn’t pin point one.

Frankly speaking, I’m tired of wasting data each time a new ROM hits the scene as Lenovo has sort of banned OTA updates on rooted devices thus I have to flash each new update via PC. Switching back to stock ROM was a challenge though as my IMEI kept getting wiped and without root there was no way of restoring it.

After so many trial and errors, I stumbled on the perfect ROM to restore my P780 to factory default ROM.

As always before you proceed, make sure to back up your data and use mobile uncle tools to backup your IMEI as well. Sorry there will be no screenshots with this tutorial as I stumbled across the fix by chance. Make sure you’re backing up IMEI to external SD card and not internal memory as the latter always get wiped when you flash your device.

Simply download and flash P780_ROW_S220_Prerooted_TWRP. Check out my how to flash Lenovo phones guide.

Once you’re done flashing the device, restore imei and fix nvram issues using these guides: How to fix Wi-Fi NVRAM WARNING: ERR 0×10 and How to Change /Restore IMEI no on Android phones and tablets?. If you backed up IMEI using Mobile Uncle Tools, just use the same to restore it.

Reboot the device. Make sure there are no invalid IMEI errors or NVRAM warnings popping up under WiFi settings then proceed to Settings >> About Phone >> System Update.

That’s all. The first update should be like 172MB. After this update, you’ll lose root and TWRP recovery will be replaced by the default Lenovo stock ROM recovery. Superuser will remain but will be non-functional. I disabled it on my device.

Lenovo seems to dropping updates too frequently with the release of VibeUI 1.5 KitKat. As I was writing this post two OTA updates of about 19MB each came through bringing the Build number to P780_ROW_S222_140817.