Rooting HTC Desire

Lawstud

Hi,

I'm sick of the lack of space warnings on my desire so I'm going to root.

Is this guide safe to follow for rooting my Desire?

http://rootmydroid.co.uk/guides/general/howto-root-your-htc-desire-wildfire-evo-incredible-with-unrevoked/

Thanks.

andrew

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that in order to root a HTC phone it has to be S-OFF (ie. a security feature which prevents rooting has to be disabled by default). To check if your phone is S-OFF (This method works for a Desire S, i'm not sure if it'd be different for a regular desire).:

Switch off your phone and take out the battery for a few seconds

Put the battery back in. While pressing the volume down button, switch on the phone.

Your phone will boot into a simple screen with a few options. If it says S-OFF at the top of the screen, then you're free to Root your phone, otherwise, you can't.

To leave this screen, tap the power button once, and then use the volume key to navigate to the 'reboot' option, and then press the power button again.

Royale with Cheese

In the same position as the OP. Had my Desire a year now, great phone and no interest in using a custom rom... but the lack of space is a piss take.

Just checked my boot menu there (for the desire you need to hold down the back button when turning on the phone, not volume down). Mine says S-ON, is that it then? No way I can override that?

You don't need to be S-OFF to root, it just gives you extra privileges that the average person wouldn't be interested in. Also that guide looks fine, but they make it sound more complicated than it is. Basically what you want to do is run unrevoked, which roots the phone. Then install clockworkmod recovery (via the Rom Manager app is probably the simplest way) to backup your current rom, then install your own custom rom, once again via Rom Manager. (I'd recommend Leedroid as a first rom).

albob

Same as OP and Royale with Cheese.

No interest in rooting and custom roms other than the memory issue.

If I root my phone using unrevoked would that give me enough privilages to sort out my memory issue i.e. delete unwanted HTC apps, move all apps without widgets to SD card etc? Do I need a custom rom to partition the SD card to give more 'internal' memory?

(OP - Sorry for jumping in on this thread)

BionicRasher

Very interested in getting more memory space but also happy with my LauncherPro at the moment. Can I just root and not flash ROMs or whatever? I just don't really know what flashing ROMs really is. Can someone explain?

Lawstud

Deleted User wrote: »

You don't need to be S-OFF to root, it just gives you extra privileges that the average person wouldn't be interested in. Also that guide looks fine, but they make it sound more complicated than it is. Basically what you want to do is run unrevoked, which roots the phone. Then install clockworkmod recovery (via the Rom Manager app is probably the simplest way) to backup your current rom, then install your own custom rom, once again via Rom Manager. (I'd recommend Leedroid as a first rom).

Is there a deterrence between the unrevoked stuff that the guide advises to download and unrevoked3. Is one more up to date. Is using one over the other better etc.

Nolimits

tui0hcg wrote: »

Very interested in getting more memory space but also happy with my LauncherPro at the moment. Can I just root and not flash ROMs or whatever? I just don't really know what flashing ROMs really is. Can someone explain?

The phone your using isn't just Android, it's Android with some HTC software on top of it called sense, this in HTCs opinion improves on just android. Every manufacturer puts their own software on it. Roms are just a replacement for this software, so it will still basically be the same but will look and feel a bit different.

I rooted my desire a couple of weeks ago, I'm happy to help out if I can if anyone has any questions

Royale with Cheese

If I follow that guide the OP posted and install unrEVOked but don't bother going to step 3 and installing a custom rom; will that give me superuser permissions and the ability to install apps2d?

amby666

Deleted User wrote: »

You don't need to be S-OFF to root, it just gives you extra privileges that the average person wouldn't be interested in. Also that guide looks fine, but they make it sound more complicated than it is. Basically what you want to do is run unrevoked, which roots the phone. Then install clockworkmod recovery (via the Rom Manager app is probably the simplest way) to backup your current rom, then install your own custom rom, once again via Rom Manager. (I'd recommend Leedroid as a first rom).

I've had my Desire about a year now, and the frustration of running out of space is the biggest issue. I've tried a few roms, including Leedroid (great, 1st one I tried), SuperNova (didn't like), and Oxygen, which I used for the last few months.
Still never had enough space, use a lot of apps, even putting all I could on the SD card. Had justified an upgrade to Galaxy S2 or Sensation but at the weekend I tried another ROM, AceSMod007. I love it! It's so slick, like a whole new phone. And a very small footprint, so lots of space left. Well worth a try.

Lawstud

Has anyone used unrevoked 3 to root their desire successfully. I tried it and it keeps telling me that it couldn't find the root and is my firmware too up to date.

Whats the story with this? Does unrevoked 3 only work with non 2.2 devices? Surely this cant be the case. Am i doing something wrong?

My phone is pissing me off big time. Lack of memory and this rooting malarkey has me hungry for apples.

BionicRasher

Looks like HTC will be giving us a trimmed down version of Sense with the Gingerbread update - might mean we can remove some of the Sense stuff we dont use (Footprints, Facebook etc etc) free up some space
I may wait for that to see how it works before taking the rooting plunge

kenyard

to be honest rooting is great. you are over a year now as you said so warranty probably isnt valid anymore anyway (not sure how long it is)

what i really love is having pretty much unlimited space for apps. some do still use up space like google maps and others which save your preferences and stuff in cache.

either way i have around 20-30 games on my phone at the moment and there isnt one issue with it because of it. rooting is what made it worthwhile.. especially when you want angry birds etc which uses 1/4 the default space you have

as for what to use, i had my phone updated to the latest software at the time. googled around and found a one click method. instructions were confusing but worked it anyway and got everything going fine.
but yeah you could end up wiping everything and ending up in a mess..

the other thing abuot installing custom roms is that you lose everything you had already. its easy make a backup of your numbers etc.. but was annoying losing all messages, apps etc...
maybe there is a way to back these up and reput them on it, but i didnt look into it too much.

some roms also are completely different UI. I just went with the leedroid which is just an altered version of the default and its fine

i do definately suggest rooting though for apps2sd and whatnot
(actually maybe thats on it anyway, i only figured out how to alter my sd card after a while, got a 16Gb one and have 2Gb of space for apps on it now)

@lawstud, thats what i used. the unrevoked method. was on 2.2 at the time though. but was fully up to date then. I guess the desirehd has come out since and a few other phones so maybe they stopped supporting that

él statutorio

Quick question on rooting the desire. I used UnRevoked at the weekend to root mine. It all went well once I installed the various drivers etc. I can get into the various menus on boot up etc etc and I have the superuser icon. My question is related to s-on s-off. The bios(?) menu on my desire is currently set to S-On. Does this matter? Am I only half rooted?

cheers.

él statutorio

Lawstud wrote: »

Has anyone used unrevoked 3 to root their desire successfully. I tried it and it keeps telling me that it couldn't find the root and is my firmware too up to date.

Whats the story with this? Does unrevoked 3 only work with non 2.2 devices? Surely this cant be the case. Am i doing something wrong?

My phone is pissing me off big time. Lack of memory and this rooting malarkey has me hungry for apples.

Mine is 2.2 and it worked, it took a bit of mucking about with drivers untill unrevoked saw the phone though. Even then the phone kept locking itself so the process kept failing. I had to turn off the lock function on the phone to get it working.

slayerking

él statutorio wrote: »

Quick question on rooting the desire. I used UnRevoked at the weekend to root mine. It all went well once I installed the various drivers etc. I can get into the various menus on boot up etc etc and I have the superuser icon. My question is related to s-on s-off. The bios(?) menu on my desire is currently set to S-On. Does this matter? Am I only half rooted?

cheers.

Your rooted alright, you can install root only apps and flash most roms I believe, however some roms require the HTC security flag to be turned off in order to allow things like changing the size of system partitions and that.
I rooted my phone last week and also S-OFF'd it using alpharev.


I found this guide here to be a great guide...

Royale with Cheese

I've rooted my desire and installed Leedroid along with partitioning my SD card for more space. I had to unistall and reinstall a few apps to get them to perform better after partitioning and doing a titanium backup, but things are looking ok now.

What's the deal with flashing a radio? There are a list of radios available on the Leedroid site where I downloaded the Rom. The most recent version is a newer version than the baseband on my phone? Am I ok to update to this? I noticed some poor wifi performance after I rooted, could flashing an radio improve performance in this kind of area?

Lochlannach

I rooted and went s-off a couple of nights ago...been running InstallCoin (Gingerbread and latest Sense) and am reasonably pleased with it.

There are improvements in a few of the Sense things that annoyed me before - the lock screen is more useful and speeds up access to stuff (i.e. you can go straight to one of 4 configurable apps as part of the unlock). The main apps menu is improved by the page like setup. The "Quick Settings" means I don't have to clutter up my screen with icons to turn on/off wifi, gps, etc. I've also removed the space issues by doing this (1GB ext4 on SD).

I was hoping for a battery improvement but I doubt there's any. Also, and I stress this is no fault of the ROM, Sygic mobile maps will not run on Gingerbread.

Idleater

slayerking wrote: »

I found this guide here to be a great guide...

Cheers for the link.

Spent the afternoon messing about and now am running CM7 as I wanted to see what a "raw android" rom was like.