Rooting a HTC Desire

T

Tozman

New member
Hello guys, I wonder if I should root my Desire. I read that it is trickier and the rewards are less compared to the Nexus One, but oh well, Desire is great and I have no regrets about it

Just wondering if I should root it. Is it advisable to? And after rooting will I be able to get Froyo OTA (rumored to be released in a couple weeks)
 
You won't be able to get any OTA update ever again if you root, unless you unroot and put your original firmware back.

Rooting can offer some benefits, and it has some drawbacks (invalidating your warranty, risk of bricking your phone, unreliable and untested custom firmwares, etc).

The real question is: What feature do you require that your phone does not currently have, that custom ROMs do have, that warrant the drawbacks I mentioned above? Especially given that HTC have said the Desire will get FroYo in August.
 
I don't know, my friends root (their milestones) and in a really popular local forum I surf most android users root their phones too. And a guy said (Nexus One) that without rooting Android is really customizable, after rooting even more so.

Just wanted to give it a go. Heh.
 
QFT

I had my Nexus rooted, and installed amon ra's recovery tools and while I was notified of the 2.2 OTA, it failed verification. I had a difficult time finding the stock roms that would work on a custom recovery. Now that I know what I'm looking for, it should be easier but I wanted to reiterate what extorian posted.

Be sure that the advantages of rooting outweigh the disadvantages, like no more OTAs, voiding your warranty, etc.
 
Well, here's the guide most people seem to use to root their HTC Desires: http://android.modaco.com/content/htc-desire-desire-modaco-com/311328/02-jul-r21-modaco-custom-rom-for-htc-desire-with-online-kitchen-froyo-frf91/#entry1311840

The features it adds are:
Rooted with Superuser 2.1 by ChainsDDBuilt with the MCR build process which reduces the size and boosts the speed of the ROMBased on Kali and Defer's kernel with near stock FRF50 config + EXT4 + tunRooted boot image with 'adb remount' permission and superuser APKbusybox with Droid Explorer supportterminfo and settings in boot.img to allow nano etc. useOpenVPN binaryHTC_IME to jonasl's v27 for 2.2, based on my Desire leakSystem dalvik-cache moved to /cache partitionUpdated Google MapsMCR version displayed in 'About' screenOptional A2SD and A2SD+ (old style) via the online kitchenOptional baked in Wavesecure via the online kitchen (installed to system partition for maximum security)Optional WiFi Status indicatorDe-odexed for theming support!Optional Trackball Wake
If you don't know what a given feature means or does, then you almost certainly don't need that feature.
 
But being on a phone that is behind by a few months isn't all doom and gloom. Consider what happened with FroYo. We've had two rushed out updates to address a variety of issues, some very serious. When the first official FroYo OTA was released, there were still many thousands of apps on the Market that had not been updated. Some didn't work at all. Some caused the phone to lock up on booting. Most worked absolutely fine of course.

My point is... waiting a few months has certain advantages - all your apps will have been updated to work with the new version, and any issues with the OS itself will have mostly been ironed out.
 
Good points you guys brought up, I guess I won't root it then.

BTW the link you provided me isn't rooting the phone, it's flashing FroYo on it. Hmm.
 
You have to root your phone in order to bypass the security features that prevent you from installing a custom ROM (i.e. ForYo in this case, as it's not out for the Desire yet). There is very little point in rooting your phone (gaining super user access) unless you want to install a custom ROM too which gives you tools like SuperUser (SU).
 
Is it possible to root my phone while using the same firmware? That way I don't think I'll void my warranty, and I can install popular apps such as Titanium Backup (which requires a rooted phone).
 
No - in order to root your phone you will need to re-flash something (boot loader, recovery image, ROM, etc). It depends on the manufacturer, but any or all of those can invalidate your warranty.

The only additional thing backup apps can backup when rooted is paid apps. But you can always download these again. My Backup Pro, for example, will backup everything without root, apart from paid apps. If you are rooted, it'll do paid apps too.
 
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