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!

ZFS root disk mirror

So, I just installed OpenSolaris on a Sun Blade X6240 Server Module. I have two disks on this machine, and wanted to use disk mirroring. I didn't want to use the integrated LSI 1068E hardware RAID controller, I wanted to use the much cooler ZFS mirror feature.

During installation, it was not possible to set up mirroring, it had to wait until after the first boot. The installation wizard created the necessary partitions, ZFS filesystem and installed GRUB on the system, and I don't know what commands it has run to set up the disk the way it is now. So, to attach the mirror disk to the ZFS pool, I copied the partition table to the mirror:

# prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c8t0d0s2  | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c8t1d0s2

Now that's done, and I proceeded to attach the mirror disk into the ZFS pool:

# zpool status rpool
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
 scrub: none requested
config:

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool       ONLINE       0     0     0
          c8t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors
# zpool attach -f rpool c8t0d0s0 c8t1d0s0
Please be sure to invoke installgrub(1M) to make 'c8t1d0s0' bootable.
# zpool status rpool
  pool: rpool
 state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered.  The pool will
        continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
 scrub: resilver in progress for 0h0m, 15.41% done, 0h1m to go
config:

        NAME          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        rpool         ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror      ONLINE       0     0     0
            c8t0d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0
            c8t1d0s0  ONLINE       0     0     0  1.07G resilvered

errors: No known data errors

Installing GRUB and updating the master boot sector was also necessary to be able to boot off the mirror:

# installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c8t1d0s0
Updating master boot sector destroys existing boot managers (if any).
continue (y/n)?y
stage1 written to partition 0 sector 0 (abs 16065)
stage2 written to partition 0, 271 sectors starting at 50 (abs 16115)
stage1 written to master boot sector

And that's that!