root recover and root a bit more

I'm sure it's an omen but after the G300 I got a HTC desire (as my wife upgraded her phone this week) and as my Brother got his G300 working great he passed on his San Francisco (ZTE).

The Desire runs a (for me) a nice Android interface and has been a great workhorse so I just wanted to root it and put a bootloader.

The rooting needs the S-Off so I used Revolutionary which is available for Windows and linux - I also got myself the AmonRa image (recovery-RA_2.0.1.img)

Revolutionary requires a beta code (if you look on HTC developer site they do a similar unlock through a code), this was just a case of putting the phone in debug mode and running revolutionary from the linux terminal, put the code in and the S-OFF mode was immediate.

Put the phone in Hloader (hold Vol-down and power) and you see a new purple header for revolutionary.

Next step was to pop AmonRa on which needed you to select Fastboot from the recovery menu, it then shows "fastboot" - plug the USB cable in and this changes to say "fastboot USB", I used the fastboot files with the CWM and just executed the AmonRa manually from linux terminal "./fastboot-linux flash recovery recovery-RA_2.0.1.img"

This puts the recovery image on, you can test this by holding Vol-down and power to Hboot and then select "Recovery" the screen will pause 2 or 3 seconds but then the AmonRa loader will load.

I used AmonRa as I just prefer it, no other reason, CWM would probably have been just as good.

Finally I popped the root  file "su-2.3.6.3-efgh-signed.zip" into the root of the SD card, then use the option to install from SD card and the HTC is rooted.

Time from start to finish, about 20 minutes tinkering.

I've not updated the Android itself but can now make a Nandroid backup, run root apps like Link2SD and so on, which is all I wanted.

The ZTE was already rooted and had CWM installed, with CM7 Android, the problem was the battery life was terrible so I looked for alternatives.

I located Swedish Snow and got that, with CWM this was just a case of putting the zip onto the SD card and installing from there.

Only time will tell if the battery life is better, the interface is fine though and works great, everything's there and I can't find any apps that don't work.

I rounded the afternoon off by replacing the left hand screen hinge in my brothers Laptop !