Rooting the HTC Hero

On friday I got my new HTC Hero in the mail. Yesterday, I rooted it following instructions on phandroid.com. Instead of from Windows, like in the article on phandroid.com, I did it from Linux, and here is how.

1. Download android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3.zip

2. Download orange-htc-hero-uk-boot.img-28-july-2009.zip

3. Download fastboot for Linux.

4. Run these commands:

# unzip android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3.zip
# unzip orange-htc-hero-uk-boot.img-28-july-2009.zip
# mv orange-htc-hero-uk-boot.img-28-july-2009/boot.img.insecure android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3/tools
# unzip fastboot.zip
# mv fastboot android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3/tools
# cd android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r3/tools

5. Shutdown the phone and plug in the USB cable.

6. Press and hold the back key and power on the phone.
This will get you into the fastboot USB screen (the white screen with three androids at the bottom).

7. Run this command:

# sudo ./fastboot boot boot.img.insecure
downloading 'boot.img'... OKAY
booting... OKAY

Now your device will start from the given image with root access.

8. In the phone's alerts menu, click HTC Sync.

9. Run this command:

sudo ./adb shell

This will give you a root shell on the device.

10. From this shell, run these commands:

# mount -o rw,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
# cp -a /system/bin/su /system/bin/su.backup
# cat /system/bin/sh > /system/bin/su
# chmod 4755 /system/bin/su
# reboot

Now your device is rooted!