How To: Root the HTC Desire
June 7, 2010 in Featured
THIS PROCEDURE IS OBSOLETE! PLEASE HEAD TO THE NEW HOW TO ROOT THE HTC DESIRE (UNREVOKED METHOD) PROCEDURE:
HOW TO: ROOT THE HTC DESIRE (UNREVOKED METHOD)
I. Before You Begin
1. This is how to root the HTC Desire, do NOT use this on any other phone!
2. This will erase all the data on your phone so please at least sync your contacts with Google before continuing.
II. Create a Goldcard
1. Do our How To Create a Goldcard procedure and create a goldcard for your phone. Once you have it created, put the goldcard into the phone and come back to this procedure and continue.
III. Flash the Rooted ROM
1. Download the Rooting Tools
0.75.xxxx or below AND a current ROM of 1.15.xxx.x or below – Desire Rooting Tools
OR
If the above download is not suitable – if you have a bootloader version 0.80.xxxx or below AND a current ROM of 1.21.xxx.x or below – Desire Rooting Tools
2. Unzip them to the C: drive on your computer (so the path is C:/r6-desire-root/)
3. Plug in your phone and mount the sd card.
4. Save the update.zip file from within the rooting tools folder on to the root of the sd card of your phone (NOT inside any folders just on the sd card itself). When done, unplug the phone.
5. Turn off your phone and turn it back on by holding down Back and Power until you see Fastboot come up on the screen. Push the Power button while highlighting Fastboot on the phone and Fastboot should show up in red now on the phone (if it doesn’t push Power again until it does).
6. Plug the phone in via USB cable to the computer.
7. Open the folder you extracted to the C drive and double click “step1-windows.bat” and wait for it to finish.
8. Once you see the menu on the phone come back up, navigate to BOOTLOADER and push power, then navigate to RECOVERY using the volume buttons to navigate and the power button to select and the phone should boot to the ! screen.
9. On the phone push Volume Up and Power to get the menu to show up.
10. Now you should see a recovery screen menu, navigate to Wipe and select it. Then navigate to Wipe data/factory reset and select that.
11. Once that is done, go back to the main menu and select Apply sdcard:update.zip and wait for it to flash. All done, you have root access and can use any root required app! Enjoy!
IV. Load a Custom ROM etc (Optional)
1. Head over to our How To Load a Custom ROM on the HTC Desire procedure and continue with that to load custom ROMs and other fun stuff!
Thanks to Paul at Modaco for his awesome scripts!
Reported Issues:
Issue: My phone is SIM locked now!
Solution: Simply go to the next procedure and load a custom ROM to fix this.
Bball_23_89 said on September 1, 2011
okay some one help me please
i have tried the revoked method and it wont do anything at all it says it cant be installed at the moment and it pisses me off… i want to root my phone like super bad 
help please!
Eugenijus Sochas said on September 25, 2011
Hi,
First of all thank you for very easily understandable manual. I tried to root my HTC Desire running Gingerbread 2.3.3, but unrevoked couldn’t finish rooting and I got message “is your firmware too new”.
Can I root my device, or I can’t do this?
Vijay Vennapusa said on November 12, 2011
u should erase ur phone memory(Factory data reset)
Androidmania said on October 13, 2011
Hi,
When Desire Rooting Tool is downloaded, it cannot be unzipped. Can you check if the file is not corrupted?
Zhu Jie said on October 27, 2011
I Can not Download r6-desire-root-alt.zip, Why?!!
Vince Bareng said on January 27, 2012
I tried to update my HTC Desire 2.3.3 but had an error message saying my version is too new. is there any new version of unrevoked for 2.3.3 running HTC Desire?
James said on September 29, 2010
Please HELP – i can only access the hboot and recovery on my phone.
Where can i find a bacup of the HTC Desire that i can install on the sd card? I mistakenly deleted the system and the data without seeing that there was a backup option in recovery.