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I don't read what's handed to me.

- George W. Bush, 03/15/2000

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Motorola Droid Rooted

After a long wait, the Verizon Droid (Motorola Sholes) has been rooted. The method is being kept secret until it becomes patched to slow down the process as long as possible. As with many android hacks, we owe our thanks to zinx (#android-root on freenode) for finding this vulnerability. zinx does not own a Verizon Droid, his Droid owning helper is [mbm], a big thanks to him too!

Before applying this update, be sure to install the 2.0.1 patch first, as doing it second will un-root the device. This has been tested and does work providing the SHA1 checksum matches as shown below. A safe copy can be downloaded here. Place this item in your SD card as update.zip. Reboot the phone and hold the x key on the hardware keyboard until you see the Motorola logo, than release. You will see an exclamation point and a phone, do not panic, press Volume Up + Camera at the same time. You will see a menu, slide out your keyboard and navigate to Apply sdcard update in the menu, press in on the center button. The update will install and you may than reboot.

???842634563f78ecc11c7d4155684a09cc06d4c9c8  signed-voles-ESD56-from-ESD20.84263456.zip

To get root on the Verizon Droid, firstdownload droid-root.zip and copy it to your SD card as update.zip and follow the steps below.

• Reboot your phone.
• Press x on the hardware keyboard while booting until you see the white Motorola logo, then release.
• Press Volume Up + Camera when you see a picture of an exclamation point and a phone.
• Navigate through the menu using the arrows on the hardware keyboard (portrait mode) to Apply sdcard update.
• Apply the update and reboot.
• You now have root.

This is not a traditional Android “rooting”, root access is presently only available through the adb shell. Install the Android Debug Bridge to your PC and enable USB debugging in your phone by going to Settings -> Applications -> Development and selecting USB debugging. In your systems shell (or command prompt for windows) type adb shell (assuming your paths are correct setup) and you will be connected to your Verizon Droid. Type su and you are root. Be very careful with this as you can do damage to your phone when in a root shell.

It should now only be a matter of time before a custom firmware is available for the Motorola Sholes. Do not flash any other firmware updates as this may patch the vulnerability used by droid-root.zip.

If you would like to have root on-the-go inside of say Better Terminal Emulator follow these instructions.

Download this modified su command here. Push the new su command to the phone with adb push su /data/local/su. Now, launch a shell on your computer with adb shell. Type the following commands [checked that mtdblock4 is the correct device for /system using the mount command with no arguments].

• su
• mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/mtdblock4 /system
• cd /system/bin
• mv su osu
• dd if=/data/local/su of=su
• chmod 6755 su
• sync

Now if you open your phone and enter a terminal emulator of your choice and type su, you will have root.