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Root [Guide] S-OFF and ROOT HTC Desire with Revolutionary - Updated

whitegust said:
Which is in your opinion best ROM for Desire?
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My favourites were always Oxygen 2.3.2, REDUX2 & dGB. All very stable & with excellent battery utilisation. I have copies of these & a number of other (mostly AOSP) ROMs if you have difficulty finding the files to download via XDA.
 
Isn't there a new method to do it, some of the links are not working , and also Revolutionary webpage is down..i'm really strugling to root this old bastard!Tx guys!
 
It's not surprising that links for a phone of this age no longer work. The older Unrevoked method kept its links up after Revolutionary disappeared, but I'll be surprised if anything still works now given that it's literally 10 years since this phone was released.

James: unless they've located and applied the RUU-only 2.3 update an unmodified Bravo will almost certainly be on 2.2. There was never anything higher than 2.3 released for this device.

The official bootloader unlock is probably still possible via the HTCDev site, but there's no S-Off if you do that, no official 2.3 (as the hboot version is newer than for the official 2.3 RUU so you won't be able to install that), and I'd make sure you can find a recovery for the device before doing it (because there's no point otherwise).
 
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Since the phone is on 2.3 and revolutionary is gone I don't think S-Off will be possible.

That is, assuming this is the correct phone? I don't recall the official 2.3 ROM being 2.3.3, which makes me wonder whether this is a different "Desire" (Desire S, Desire HD, or one of the other phones they used the name "Desire" on)? Of course it may be that I no longer remember precisely.
 
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Hadron said:
Since the phone is on 2.3 and revolutionary is gone I don't think S-Off will be possible.

That is, assuming this is the correct phone? I don't recall the official 2.3 ROM being 2.3.3, which makes me wonder whether this is a different "Desire" (Desire S, Desire HD, or one of the other phones they used the name "Desire" on)? Of course it may be that I no longer remember precisely.
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this is the bastard .
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Hadron said:
OK, yes, that's a Bravo all right (the original Desire). In fact that's the first hardware revision, same as mine was.
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So , isn't there a new method to s-off it , and also to root, by the way mine is also network locked in some northern country, i've tryed HTC_Desire_Unlock_v0.9.5 but with no luck..
 
Revolutionary was the new method for this stuff, and was supported for several years - by which time the number of people still using this phone was small, and the number wanting to root for the first time even smaller.

The problem is that this is a 10 year old phone. After some time the people who provide such tools go off and do other things, the demand for the tools is tiny and hosting and supporting them costs somebody money. Which is why the download sites disappear eventually. Heck, I deleted my own copies of Desire mods in a tidy-up about 4 years ago.

Slightly to my surprise the older Unrevoked tool's website is still up. But I don't think that works with the 2.3 firmware. I was never a fan of those "one click root" apps, and most of those came much later than this, but perhaps one will work. I doubt that S-Off will be possible any more though.
 
Tech Stuff said:
:( i still have hope that i can do it, i'll keep on trying , if i succeed i'll come back here with the solution!
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Hey

I'm trying to revive my HTC Desire, starting with S-Off.

Mine is running an old version of Cyanogenmod and i would like to try something a bit newer. So far I have been unable to start any recovery image and while I can run Unrevoked, it aborts saying "Error: failed to get root. Is your firmware too new?".

Have you had any success with your phone?
 
Doctor Walrus said:
Hey

I'm trying to revive my HTC Desire, starting with S-Off.

Mine is running an old version of Cyanogenmod and i would like to try something a bit newer. So far I have been unable to start any recovery image and while I can run Unrevoked, it aborts saying "Error: failed to get root. Is your firmware too new?".

Have you had any success with your phone?
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you most likely have a newer firmware that unrevoked will not work on. what is your firmware version?
 
wait i'm confused. you have s-on yet you have Cyanogenmod on the phone? how is that possible? and what do you mean by "unable to start any recovery image"? you cannot install custom recovery unless you have s-off first.
 
Unrevoked won't work because you are already running a custom ROM. The rest of the firmware is actually very old - looks like it was never updated after purchase (probably because it was rooted and a custom ROM stuck on it very early on).

So your main issue is recovery. What happens when you try to boot into recovery?

If your objective is S-Off, do you have a copy of the Revolutionary tool? If not is alpharev still available (alpharev.nl if memory serves)? If it is, what do the instructions there say about what firmware or ROM is required? I used it back in 2010 or 2011, but don't recall whether I had to flash back to stock, whether recovery was needed, etc. Don't try to update the firmware until you know how you will get S-Off, since if you update too far alpharev won't work.

ocnbrze said:
wait i'm confused. you have s-on yet you have Cyanogenmod on the phone? how is that possible? and what do you mean by "unable to start any recovery image"? you cannot install custom recovery unless you have s-off first.
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No, you don't need S-Off for that. It's possible to unlock the bootloader on one version of the firmware, but with the Desire we originally used other tricks to enable flashing of the recovery partition. I ran mine rooted and with custom ROMs for many months before going S-Off. You do however need S-Off for some other hacks, such as replacing the bootloader with an edited version in order to increase user-accessible storage (by shrinking the system partition) - the sort of thing we did with this device due to how inadequate the storage was...
 
Hadron said:
Unrevoked won't work because you are already running a custom ROM. The rest of the firmware is actually very old - looks like it was never updated after purchase (probably because it was rooted and a custom ROM stuck on it very early on).
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Indeed, that's how it was. I rooted it soon after I bought it and it hasn't seen any official HTC software ever since...

Hadron said:
So your main issue is recovery. What happens when you try to boot into recovery?
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I get a screen with a red exclamation mark. I seem to remember (it has been a *very* long while though) that at that point I had to push something to the phone, a basic root file system of some kind, but I have no idea where I would get that from. Plus all the instructions seem to imply that the recovery system should be something that lives entrierly on the phone these days.

Hadron said:
If your objective is S-Off, do you have a copy of the Revolutionary tool? If not is alpharev still available (alpharev.nl if memory serves)? If it is, what do the instructions there say about what firmware or ROM is required? I used it back in 2010 or 2011, but don't recall whether I had to flash back to stock, whether recovery was needed, etc. Don't try to update the firmware until you know how you will get S-Off, since if you update too far alpharev won't work
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No, unfortunately I don't have a copy of that. I must have visited that website dozens of times in the last couple of days because it is mentioned everywhere (and I keep opening links like a lemming) but all it says is "Hi, this is shadowchild.nl."

Hadron said:
the sort of thing we did with this device due to how inadequate the storage was...
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Good times! :)
 
The red screen with the black triangle is the HTC stock recovery. You need to press some button combination (volume up + power I think) to get the recovery menu. But the problem is that if you have the stock recovery it can't be used to flash custom software. I waited until Unrevoked came out, which used an exploit to install a custom recovery (some version of ClockworkMod as I recall). However I'm certain that Unrevoked required stock software, which matches your experience.

If you can still find a custom recovery for this device you could just try fastboot flashing it anyway, see whether the hack that was used to install CM enabled flashing recovery as well. That's harmless.

Otherwise in order to get Unrevoked to run you'll probably have to flash back to stock, i.e. find a suitable RUU. Shipped-ROMs probably still has a collection of these (or AndroidRUU, but Shipped-ROMs was particularly popular in the Desire days). Check what Unrevoked say about compatibility and don't flash anything too recent: I know for sure it wouldn't work with the Android 2.3 firmware. The drawback is that if Unrevoked then doesn't work you are probably stuck with a stock Desire.

But I've just checked myself, and Alpharev does indeed seem to be unavailable as well as Revolutionary. And those are the only 2 methods I know of for gaining S-Off with this device, so even if you can install a custom recovery you probably won't be able to get S-Off.
 
Ah excellent, that way I do get a menu. I did manage to install some RUUs but none that were older than the cyanogenmod version I had installed. Plus in the process I seem to have upgraded my HBOOT which, I think, is a bad thing.

I did manage to download revolutionary, unfortunately their website is down and now handing out any more keys, so I would appear to be out of luck for now...
 
I don't think that the problem when running CM was that firmware was too new, it was that you had CM. The rest of the firmware was very old. So it depends on how far you updated the hboot. There is a catch-22 here though: you cannot flash an RUU with older firmware unless you are already S-Off.

I'd forgotten about tokens for revolutionary though. Yeah, that one is hopeless then.
 
Hadron said:
I don't think that the problem when running CM was that firmware was too new, it was that you had CM. The rest of the firmware was very old. So it depends on how far you updated the hboot. There is a catch-22 here though: you cannot flash an RUU with older firmware unless you are already S-Off.
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HBOOT is at version 1.02 now and I'm still getting the same error message from revolutionary. I also managed to find bootable ISO of alpharev S-OFF but that one doesn't work either, seems it can't figure out the device's current software version.

Hadron said:
I'd forgotten about tokens for revolutionary though. Yeah, that one is hopeless then.
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Indeed. It's a shame that people put these kinds of silly restrictions in their software.
 
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