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What's the best method for rooting HTC Desire?

Do I need both S-OFF and root? How are these two things related?

I essentially want to root because I am often short on space so I want to be able to store apps and associated data on the SD memory card instead of the internal phone memory. For this I will need root, right?

Will I be able to use the original HTC software/ROM after rooting?

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AFAIK, S-OFF is security off, which is a pre-requisite for flashing custom roms..read, installing a custom recovery/kernel/ROM... – t0mm13b Jan 24 at 16:42
S-Off is a hardware based write protect scheme for the storage area, i.e. the flash region where the system data resides gets set read-only during boot. There's a hacked bootloader available at alpharev.nl that doesn't write-protect that region when booting and leaves it writable the normal way. S-Off is thus a prerequisite for modding/rooting. – ce4 Jan 24 at 16:45
I just added the rooting tag to your question. Please hover your mouse over it for more information, and follow the hints there. We have a central index to find the rooting questions for special devices, and yours is already listed there (How to root a HTC Desire running official Android 2.3?) The answers there should provide you some help ;) Good luck! – Izzy Jan 24 at 16:45
I didn't find the central index you talk about. I did go to the root tag. Where do I find that? Are you talking about the root tag page?... or some kind of Wiki or FAQ for rooting? This phone came with Android 2.2 or maybe 2.1 stock and was probably upgraded OTA to 2.2 (I don't really remember). – Sammy Jan 24 at 17:34
What's the method where you reboot the phone and enter HBoot and then you connect it to USB and use ADB to send some commands and stuff?... where you need to install some driver and HTC Sync? Is that Unrevoked or is that just the way every rooting process starts?... – Sammy Jan 24 at 17:39

marked as duplicate by Izzy, ce4, t0mm13b, Ryan Conrad, Al Everett Jan 24 at 17:41

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1 Answer

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One of the best methods to root the HTC Desire is to use Unrevoked. It will install root and a custom recovery. You can check the guide in XDA Forums

S-ON (default phone state) will read-lock your /system and /recovery partitions, so despite being root, you won't be able to modify them. With S-OFF you remove that lock and can make use of root in all the phone. To achieve S-OFF you can use Revolutionary.

I suppose what you want is to use any App2SD script. For that you will need to be root and depending on the script you want to use, you might also need S-OFF to be able to write in init.d

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So the system will be stored on the internal phone memory and apps and app data will be stored on SD? – Sammy Jan 24 at 16:59
I was under the impression that Revolutionary can do both, both root and do S-OFF. But if I understand you correctly I need Revolutionary to do S-OFF and Unrevoked for root? I will need both? – Sammy Jan 24 at 17:01

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