So I’ve had my HTC Desire S a couple of months now, and it’s all be working fine, so now seemed a good time to brick it. Well, worst case! The initial plan was to first change it to S-Off, then root it and then get a custom ROM on there.
Thanks to @comdot for his help today, at least I had someone to blame if it did go tits up (thankfully nothing did, but while we’re at it – I’m not responsible if you follow this guide and brick your phone. If that happens, you Sir, are on your own - OK?)
I followed a lot of information from this forum initially, there’s some very useful stuff on there.
It’s a good idea to first turn off fast boot, and turn on USB debugging mode (Settings, Applications, Development)
Turn off the phone, then hold in the volume down button and turn it on, keeping the volume down held, then you will find a new menu with some interesting stuff there. It will show S-On at the top, this basically means it’s locked, and you can’t root it until this is off.
Take a look also at the HBOOT Info on the second line, you will need this later.
You can then reboot the phone and on your PC, download the S-Off software from revolutionary.io. Unzip this on your PC and its also worth uninstalling HTC Sync from control panel if you have it installed. Also download the HTC fastboot drivers from here. Also check that your phone is supported by going here. You will also need to create a BETA key on that site, for this you will need your serial number to generate your BETA key, which can be found in Settings, About Phone.
Next, plug in the phone via USB and run the software. When prompted, hit Yes.
Once complete, you check your phone again by holding down the volume key and it should now read S-Off.
All you have now is S-Off, not root. To get root, download this file and place it on your phones memory card. Turn off the phone, and turn it back on again using the volume down as before. Go to recovery mode and install zip from SD card. Choose the zip we just downloaded (su-2.3.6.3-efgh-signed.zip) and install it. Once complete, you can go back and reboot the phone.
Now you have root, now you can perform all your backups. To do this, download Titanium Backup. I backed up my Angry Birds data as well as WiFi access point data and some other bits and pieces individually. I also created a entire phone backup, just in case it all went horribly wrong!
You can also grab a copy or ROM Manager from the Market Place to have a play with.
You should already have the Superuser app, but its worth checking if there are updates available for it.
I decided to use the latest ROM from here, as I’d heard good things about it, there are many more out there to play with though. Download the file and copy it to the SD card as before. Reboot the phone holding down the volume key as before and then factory reset the phone. Also delete user data and wipe the cache. You can then proceed to installing the new ROM from the zip file by locating it on the memory card.
This will take a little while, don’t worry (like I did!) and you will then boot into your lovely new ROM – awesomeness!