Rooting your Android device can unlock the hidden capabilities of your Android device. It is essentially giving you administrator access over the core software that runs the device. There are risks involved when doing this, you might end up with an Android paperweight and it might also void your warranty. Following is a basic guide to rooting your Motorola Droid.
You are going to need a few things before undertaking this task. Firstly a Motorola Droid (phone) – Second a Windows PC. You are going need a few tools. Lifehacker have assembled a rooting pack for this specific purpose (do a search for ‘Lifehacker Droid Rooting Pack’ and download it). You will also need a USB cable to connect the phone to your PC. Now the fun really begins.
You will need to downgrade your Android version to 2.0 before you do any real rooting. That is a separate guide however because it is not specifically rooting your Droid. After you have done this the real rooting begins. Plug your phone into your PC and install the Motorola USB drivers. Turn off the phone and then turn it back on while holding up on the D-Pad. This will access the bootloader for the Droid and you can do the next step. Start up RSD Lite when this has been accomplished (you should get notice of a successful USB connection prior to running RSD Lite – this is how you know it is the right time to run RSD Lite). Run RSD Lite by right mouse clicking it and running as administrator then click start. Now wait and let it do its thing. It will probably take a few minutes. Don’t interrupt this process!
If it stops at any point and fails (it will tell you if it fails) run it again until it successfully complete. If it hangs – don’t freak out, just wait. Now you need to root the phone. Disconnect it from your computer after RSD Lite does its magic and then reconnect the phone. This time mount it as a drive. In the Lifehacker torrent there will be a file called update.zip. Drag it to the SD card of your phone and then reboot it the phone into recovery mode – press x while the phone starts up. When you get the triangle/exclamation mark on screen press the volume up button and then the camera button.
Now you will need to apply the sdcard:update.zip. Scroll through until you find the option to apply this file. It will apply it and then you will need to reboot the phone. You have now rooted your Motorola Droid – it may look as if nothing is different however, you have administrator privileges over the phone now. Now you can install custom roms that unlock some pretty nifty functions in your Motorola Droid.
You will need to install a rom manager and find some roms in order to utilise the power of the root access over the device. I won’t go into specifics about that here. Just be happy you have managed to root your Motorola Droid for now.
