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

Hadron said:
Hi Klausbird, and welcome to AF :)

1) My main computer is also a Mac, and I've used virtual machines for similar operations before (though I used Linux VMs rather than Windows). I can't see any reason this shouldn't work.

2) Yes, that's correct.

3) Likewise. Both of those other guides are just for setting up stuff - what you do with it is described in this thread.

Good luck! :)
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Thanks, Hadron!
 
drb01 said:
On a different note, for the first time I put a new ROM in my HTC Desire. Went for RunnymedeMod007_v27_c-CM7-STOCK (sense 3.5) and it is basically a huge improvement, and so liberating to have unlimited memory.

The trouble is, the whole phone seems very sluggish, esp web browsing either using the built in browser or Dolphine. I opted to have Dalvik cache on the SD card - was that a mistake? It is a new 32GB class 10 SD card. Or should I just expect it to be a lot slower now that it is so much more dependent on the SD card? Also it hung a couple of times to the extent i had to pull the battery out - hope that doesn't happen too often!
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Dalvik to SD does have some performance impact, but unless you are running a fairly fast ROM in the first place it's not really noticeable (e.g. in my experience it's only marginally observable on CM7). So while it's possible that having the dalvik on sd is a factor, I wouldn't be surprised it it's the ROM itself. That's a port of the Sensation ROM, although I don't use Sense myself, from comments I've read over the years my impression is that Sense 3.5 is about the heaviest it got and that they started slimming it down after that.

If we're lucky someone with experience of that ROM will be able to comment, but it's getting pretty quiet here :)
 
Hadron said:
Dalvik to SD does have some performance impact, but unless you are running a fairly fast ROM in the first place it's not really noticeable (e.g. in my experience it's only marginally observable on CM7). So while it's possible that having the dalvik on sd is a factor, I wouldn't be surprised it it's the ROM itself. That's a port of the Sensation ROM, although I don't use Sense myself, from comments I've read over the years my impression is that Sense 3.5 is about the heaviest it got and that they started slimming it down after that.

If we're lucky someone with experience of that ROM will be able to comment, but it's getting pretty quiet here :)
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Thanks very much... Is there a more up-to-date ROM then that is also reliable? I quite like the Sense interface in so much as I am used to it (and can sync contacts with Outlook), but maybe I should just go for something faster which presumably saves battery life too. Main thing is to be reliable ...
 
It's not so much "up to date" you want - the problem is that things like the Runnymede ROMs are ports of ROMs from more recent, and more powerful, devices. HTC stopped supporting the Desire when it still had Sense 1.

If you like Sense but insist on reliability you might want to consider a rooted stock ROM (there are a few in the list of ROMs from XDA, which you can also find linked in the Desire All Things Root Guide sticky post in this forum). MildWild is currently working on a Sense ROM over at XDA, but I've never used it (as noted, not a Sense person). LeeDroid did good work on Sense ROMs, but the download links on his ROMs seem to be dead. In fact that may be the biggest problem - most Desire development is old now, and availability of these ROMs will become more difficult.
 
Thank you again! I guess from what you say I have two options:

1) use a more recent sense rom like CoolDroid Revolution (which is sense 4.1) which may be more "slimmed down" and hence a little faster

2) forget Sense altogether, and use a more recent Jelly Bean ROM. CyanogenMod007 would seem a sensible one? I then won't be able to use HTC Sync to sync my outlook contacts, but there must be other solutions for non sense ROMs which I can investigate.
 
If you drop Sense then actually a Gingerbread AOSP ROM (Oxygen, MildWild Oxygen or Redux based ROMs, Redux or Redux2 itself) would almost certainly be faster and more stable than the JB ROM.

The ROM I'm using, dGB, is about as fast and stable as it gets, but doesn't use an ext partition for app storage. To increase app space you need to use a custom hboot, which with this ROM can give you up to about 370MB (and you can move apps to SD the built-in way as well).

As you say, HTC Sync only works with a Sense-based ROM. I can't really help there as I also don't use Outlook.
 
Or would an ICS ROM be a good compromise? Sticking with gingerbread (which is the ROM I had before provided by HTC) feels a little antiquated now! An ext partition for app storage is a 100% must have ..
 
I doubt there's much in it between ICS and JB on the Desire. Neither reached the level of refinement and stability that GB ROMs did. Sandvold's ICS is probably about the best, from what I know, but I think there may be some quirks still (he had to give up development in September). Lots of people used that, though I only played with it briefly myself. I've never run any of the JB ROMs on the Desire so can't really recommend any particular one (I've decided that for myself GB is about right for this phone, and I'll move to JB when I upgrade).

Any ICS or JB should support sd-ext on this phone.
 
I guess I'll try it and see. The time consuming bit of changing ROMs is installing all the apps, of which I have about 40 now. Does Titanium work for re-installing the apps in one go over different ROMs? And presumably it keeps their configuration? Or is there another clever way of re-loading all the apps?
 
Another question for you, Hadron. Do I need a goldcard? I read somewhere that it is necessary if you have a branded phone. I'm not sure if I know what that is technically. My Desire is stock and was purchased from my carrier (a small local carrier) who's name is on the splash screen. If I need a goldcard, could you please point me to the best instructions on how to do that?
 
The only thing you need a Goldcard for is if you wish to flash an RUU (ROM Upgrade Utility - a windows program which loads a set of stock HTC firmware). These check that your phone's branding and the RUU match, and if you have a carrier name on the splash screen I guess your phone is branded. The goldcard subverts this check and lets you run other RUUs. You'd use an RUU to unroot or fix a really bad software mess.

If your phone is GSM (has a SIM card) then Revolutionary will replace your current bootloader with a custom one which also includes goldcard functionality. So if you run revolutionary on a GSM Desire (Bravo) you don't need a goldcard.

If your phone is CDMA (no SIM card, some North American networks) I don't think revolutionary does this, since the way you get S-Off on a Bravo_C is different. In that case it would be worth making one.

I think that if you look in the rooting faq, linked in the All Things Root Guide sticky post in this thread (red link in my signature), there is information about making goldcards there.
 
Thanks, Hadron. I appreciate all your answers!

My phone is CDMA. Do you recommend that I make the goldcard before I go through this rooting process (S-off, custom recovery, & root)?
 
drb01 said:
I guess I'll try it and see. The time consuming bit of changing ROMs is installing all the apps, of which I have about 40 now. Does Titanium work for re-installing the apps in one go over different ROMs? And presumably it keeps their configuration? Or is there another clever way of re-loading all the apps?
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Mostly it does, yes, and if you have the Pro (paid) version you can do a batch restore (select the full set of apps you want to restore and do it in one job, rather than app by app). There are quirks though: you sometimes find an app where it just won't carry settings/data over between ROMs, or between particular ROMs (of mine, Train Times UK is probably the fussiest in this respect).

You must not try to restore system settings between ROMs though. These days Ti Pro can back up messages as XML, which does restore between ROMs, but without that you need to use something else for messages & call logs, which are otherwise stored as part of the data of a system app which may not be compatible between ROMs. Contacts also, but those are easy to transfer between ROMs without Titanium - it's automatic if saved as Google contacts, otherwise just export them from the dialer to SD (saves the address book as a vcard file) and import after changing ROMs.

You may have a setting under "privacy" which lets you back up more stuff to Google, in which case at least some app settings can be transferred that way. I never use it myself, though may test it when I change phones, so can't say how well it works.
 
Klausbird said:
Thanks, Hadron. I appreciate all your answers!

My phone is CDMA. Do you recommend that I make the goldcard before I go through this rooting process (S-off, custom recovery, & root)?
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That would be the safest thing. TBH the risks of something going wrong during those processes are very small, but it's best to have the goldcard before you need it.

There aren't many CDMA RUUs publicly available, so if you have a small carrier I'm guessing it's unlikely you can easily get hold of one of their RUUs, so a goldcard would be a reasonable precaution.
 
Since installing the custom ROM, and also Quick System Info Pro to check memory, there seem to be a bunch of different memory types:

SD card: total 28GB / 25GB free
A2SD storage: 0.96GB / 553MB
Internal: 148MB / 47MB
System 250MB / 9MB
System cache: 202MB / 197MB
Memory: 404MB / 79MB (idle 31MB)

What are all these? SD card is obvious, and I presumably A2SD is the EXT3 partition I created. But what are the rest of them?

And perhaps more importantly, if I go to Manage Applications I have the option of moving apps to "Phone Storage" or to "Phone". Which do I do? Want to keep speed as high as possible ...
 
Internal is the phone's real internal app & data storage (which is supplemented by the sd-ext). This is the /data partition of your phone's storage.

System is where the ROM lives (/system partition). Surprised only 9MB free - what ROM are you using?

System Cache is a temporary store, mainly used by the Play Store. That must be being remapped onto a RAM disk or maybe sd-ext if it's reporting 202 MB size, as a stock Desire has a 40MB /cache partition.

Memory is RAM.

The phone thinks that apps that are on the ext partition are on the phone, so "moving to phone" means moving to sd-ext. "Move to SD" just means moving to .android_secure on the sd card, same as with stock, unrooted Froyo with no ext partition. For most apps you may as well just leave them "on the phone", i.e. on sd-ext. However, some apps are structured so that they have a large library component (Google Earth is a particularly striking example), and those will take up less space if moved to SD, so if you become short of space this may be worth playing with. The reason is that with Gingerbread "moving to sd" moves the library as well, which otherwise remains in the internal storage (this was not the case with Froyo - move to sd improved with GB).

As for speed, the location of the dalvik cache is the only thing that will make any real difference, and even then it's not noticable unless you have a pretty fast ROM to start with (from my experimentation I'd say that with CM7 it was more a placebo effect than anything, and even with the most stripped-down ROMs it's a small effect).
 
So the total memory on the phone itself, ignoring the SD card, is Internal + System + Memory + some Cache (but not the 202MB reported below). Or am I double counting Memory? And this is then segregated for different purposes (e.g. the ROM presumably sits somewhere untouchable).

The ROM I am using is RunnymedeMod007_v27_c-CM7-STOCK from xa-developers. Seems very good, but very slow compared to GB supplied by HTC. Does the fact that there is only 9MB system memory matter?
 
I have reached the conclusion that I need to root my Desire and have been looking at this thread as it seems to be an excellent one for guiding me through the process.

However, before I start, I just wanted to check that my phone is suitable for the process described here. The details are:

Android 2.2.2
Software 2.29.110.6
BRAVO PVT3 SHIP S-ON
HBOOT-0.93.0001
MICROP-051d
TOUCH-PANEL-SYNW0101
Radio-5.11.05.27
Aug 10 2010,17:52:10

Thanks - this may be the first of many questions!!!!!:D
 
Hadron said:
HBOOT 0.93 is the key. That is supported by revolutionary, so you should be good to go.
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That's great news, thanks!

One more question (for now!)......how soon in the process can I do a backup?

I plan to trial this on my son's Desire - that he has just replaced - so that I can get it all straight before tackling mine. For some strange reason he doesn't want a dead phone, so, an early backup seems a good plan!!!!!
 
If you mean a nandroid backup (ROM, apps and data), you can do that once you've installed a custom recovery. The best regarded app and data backup app is Titanium Backup, but that requires you to have rooted before you can use it.

You can however back up much user data before you start. MyBackup works without root, and I think the new Carbon backup app can also do a lot on an unrooted phone (though I've never used it). There are options to back up some of your data with Google in the Privacy menu. If contacts are Google contacts they are backed up to his GMail account anyway, but you can export them to SD card to be safe, and there are a number of message backup apps you can install. So while you can't do the really comprehensive backup (nandroid) until you have a custom recovery installed, there's a fair amount you can back up before that.

As long as you follow instructions carefully there's not actually a lot of risk.
 
Well, it didn't take long to get confused - step 2, in fact!

This talks about getting an image for 4ExtRecovery, which will be used in step 6) - use fastboot to install recovery file.

The 2 options I can see are GSM or CDMA - how do I know which I need?

**EDIT** A quick search implied that if it is used on a UK network (Orange UK) then it will be GSM - is that right?
 
Yup.

"CDMA" is a standard used in some North American networks and very few other places. There is no CDMA network in the UK, so for certain yours is GSM.

Geeky appendix, and a warning about another possible confusion:

"CDMA" means Code Division Multiple Access, a way of sharing bandwidth between different phones using the same cell. It just refers to a type of multiplexing scheme, not a unique standard. But that acronym was adopted to distinguish the US networks using one standard from those using another early digital phone technology used in the US (which was based on Time Division Multiple Access, and hence became known as TDMA).

The possible confusion is that the 3G used by "GSM" networks is technically a CDMA system! It is referred to as ""WCDMA to distinguish it from the North American "CDMA" standard. So if you look in your phone's network settings you my well find an option to set it to "WCDMA-only", but that does not mean that you have a "CDMA" phone in the sense we are talking about here ;)
 
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