It’s been three months since our last State of Root post, and in that time we’ve had several breakthroughs in the HTC EVO 3D AOSP world, some great Jelly Bean ROM developments to add to the original EVO 4G’s catalog, and a re-branded EVO 3D on a different carrier called the HTC EVO V 4G.
Every month, the internet becomes a dumping ground for more and more outdated, obsolete, and potentially damaging information about root methods and ROMs for the HTC EVO line of phones. This isn’t done maliciously; it’s just easier to leave up old information than it is to go back and update things.
As of today – September 18, 2012 – everything you’ll find below should work. If several months have gone by and you’re reading this, look for a newer EVO ROOT entry on Good and EVO, and if something below is wrong, please let me know and I’ll update it as quickly as possible.
My goal here is to provide the basics for the OG/3D/V 4G/4G LTE. I can’t include every tool, method, or ROM, but my hope is to have a couple of ROMs that are decent, tools that currently work, and methods that should not cause problems. Please keep in mind that I’m dealing with the basics. If your favorite ROM, tool, or team has been overlooked, drop a note and feel free to use the comments section to point them out to me and other readers.
I do not own an EVO Shift, EVO View 4G, EVO V 4G, or EVO Design 4G. As such, I do not know if any of these these will work for those devices or be at all useful. You’re welcome to post a link to guides that work for them and I’ll incorporate them in the main post.
It bears stressing here that as of September 2012, you can completely root, flash custom ROMs, and have the whole root experience on all EVO devices via unlocking the bootloader at HTCDev.com and still get warranty repairs through most carriers. S-OFF is not required to root and flash ROMs on a phone; however, on the EVO 3D, EVO 4G LTE, and EVO V 4G, you may have to jump through one more hoop to flash a kernel.
Unlocking Bootloader/NAND/S-OFF
Note: “Old” means a working method for phones that haven’t been updated, not a dead link.
An unlocked boot.img/bootloader is required to flash Recovery, which allows you to install custom ROMs and patches.
OG EVO 4G: Unrevoked (old) | Revolutionary (old) | HTCDev (new)
EVO 3D: Revolutionary (old) | HTCDev (new) | 1.5 S-OFF (complex/expert) | Unlimited.IO 1.5 S-OFF with the wire trick (advanced)
EVO V 4G: HTCDev | JuopunutBear S-OFF
EVO 4G LTE: HTCDev | RegawMOD (automatic) | Non-destructive local root | LazyPanda S-OFF for HB 1.12
Recovery
Recovery is used to flash ROMs and .zips, create Nandroid backups, restore Nandroids, and so on.
OG EVO 4G: Amon Ra | TeamWin | ClockworkMOD
EVO 3D: TeamWIN | ClockworkMOD | Amon Ra | 4EXT
EVO V 4G: TeamWin | 4EXT
EVO 4G LTE: TeamWin
Nandroid backups
See this:
Why we root our phones
See this:
Why I rooted my phone (and why you might want to root yours too)
Superuser
Superuser is required on NAND-unlocked phones to give root access to programs.
How to unroot
OG EVO 4G: Unroot (Unrevoked/Revolutionary)
EVO 3D: Unroot (Revolutionary) | Unroot (HTCDev/return to stock)
EVO V 4G: do not have this at the moment (you would use an RUU below)
EVO 4G LTE: Unroot
Radios/HBOOT
Just in case you need to update or roll back.
OG EVO 4G: Caulkin’s thread
EVO 3D: XDA | Football’s shipped ROM collection (RUUs)
EVO V 4G: Radios for S-OFF
EVO 4G LTE: Captain Throwback’s S-ON flashable radios
ROM Update Utility
A ROM update utility (RUU) is an executable program that runs on your computer and connects to your phone and is used to restore the phone to stock, or upgrade radio or firmware. These generally only run on a PC or a virtual PC under Mac.
They are the easiest way to return your phone to stock although your bootloader may require being locked before they will run.
HTCRUU (all shipped ROMs by device codename)
Shipped-ROMs.com (original location, carries more than HTC products)
ADB
EVO 4G/EVO 3D/EVO 4G LTE: G&E’s ADB basics
EVO 4G/EVO 3D/EVO 4G LTE: ADB/Fastboot mini toolkit
Kernels
These change so fast and are useless so quickly, it’s not worth putting in a guide that will be up for three months.
Maintained or recently updated ROMs
There are, at my last count, over 80 ROMs in active development. I’m going to list just a few here. If you want to advertise another ROM just put it in the comments section with a link where to download it.
OG EVO 4G: ParanoidAndroid | The Classic | Deck’s ReLoaded | TwinTurbo
EVO 3D: MIUI | Cool ICS v6 | Swagged Out Stock | CyanogenMod 10
EVO V 4G: Mobster
EVO 4G LTE: ViperRom | MeanROM | Stock w/Goodies
Tools
OG EVO 4G/EVO 3D: HTC Supertool
OG EVO 4G/EVO 3D: QPST | QPST/Diag drivers for windows
EVO 4G LTE: RegawMOD Bootloader Customizer | RegawMOD rooter
How-to guides
Note: Posting comments or questions in any of these guides will only been seen by people reading the guide. In other words, if you’re looking for help, post in this thread or in the forums.
OG EVO/EVO 3D/EVO LTE: Create a Nandroid backup
EVO 3D: Root with HBOOT 1.50
OG EVO 4G: Unroot your EVO 4G rooted with Unrevoked
EVO 3D: Unroot your EVO 3D rooted with Revolutionary
EVO 3D: Unroot your EVO 3D rooted with HTCDev
OG EVO 4G: Root with Revolutionary
OG EVO 4G: Root with HTCDev
OG EVO 4G/EVO 3D: Join the root world if you’re on a Mac (little dated; you’ll use the HTCdev method)
EVO 3D: Recover your ROM’s kernel from the install package (if you flashed a kernel and it’s bad)
EVO 3D: How to recover your bricked rooted HTC EVO 4G or 3D
EVO 3D: Flash from recovery mode EVO 3D 1.50 / S-ON
EVO 4G LTE: How to unlock/root and still keep your stuff
EVO 4G LTE: Clear your Wallet settings when Wallet is locked down
EVO 4G LTE: Update radios/firmware on S-ON devices without losing all your stuff
Other how-to guides
If we haven’t covered it here, here’s a link to someone who has
EVO V 4G: The Complete Newbies Guide to HTC EVO V 4G rooting/flashing
HTC EVO 4G LTE: video walkthrough rooting the EVO 4G LTE
What all these things mean
Glossary of commonly used phone terms
Good places to discuss and ask questions
GoodandEVO forums
AndroPlasty
TincAndroid
TheRootofAllEVO
Did I miss something?
While I keep up with as much of the HTC EVO line as I can, lots of times something can get overlooked because development on the EVOs is so fast that a two-day-old ROM or tool looks ancient compared to the slew of new things out today. There are also now seven base EVOs out there on several carriers. I lose track.
If I missed something or you think something needs to be added/expanded/replaced, please drop a note in the comments and I’ll either update the State of Root, or readers will see that it’s been posted and is important to you.
all my devices are rooted but this is a nice collection of information you wrote up. and for the evo 4g lte i think you should add flex’s stock with goodies rom, its been running flawless for me
Good call, editing now…
honestly I thought I had it in there…
Sweet Paul! These guides are the best and always a MUST read for so many people. Honestly, every time you update this it seems to always answer almost all questions that regularly pop up on this Site for weeks/months to come. Invaluable tool all its own! Thanks again
I’ve rooted both my old evo and my new LTE and love doing it. Installing different rom’s is fun. Thanks for this guide.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1784657
Shameless self plug…
I don’t think I’ve played with Cleanrom for the 4g lte yet… will have to give that a try this week
I will actually be putting out an update in the next few days.
New update out.
How come I never see any of Mik’s roms up here. I am running miklatte on my LTE and ran mikg on my old EVO and I have yet to run any other rom smoother than his.
Mik is a genius!
because this isn’t a list of every ROM out there, just some that work… if you want a Mik ROM here, suggest it and provide a link and I’ll slap it up there.
It be easier to just put up a link to themikmik.com there you can find multiple roms for your EVO, EVO 3d, and EVO LTE, there are even roms for the red headed step child no one likes, the EVO shift. It’s a great communitty of developers, themers, and users who all help each other out. Plus it has roms for other HTC and Samsung phonesand a side of Miks roms you’ll find great roms from other developers like Meanrom, UR EVO , OMJ, just to name a few.
(since everything on the internet sounds like screaming, I will preface this with the following is not screaming, nor annoyance, just why I do it this way)
by that logic it would be easier to put up a link to forum.XDA-developers.com or google.com and say “there you go”. TheMikMik has some ancient and buggy ROMs hosted along with some great stuff. If someone’s reading the state of root, we can assume they’re potentially not rooted and looking for the shortest and most concise links/guides available.
The only reason the ROMs are there is to provide a few that we know work and are decent for someone just starting out… not to provide a link to a dumping ground of ROMs some of which may have not been developed in months. (not accusing MikMik of having crap, just saying I’m only linking to ROMs I know work and I don’t know that everything on TheMikMik works or is maintained)
As such, if there’s a MikMik ROM you want up there I’ll throw one up, but I’m not posting a “go over here and search for yourself” except where I absolutely have to because we haven’t covered it.
Haha yeah man I got ya, but trust me you should def check out of you haven’t.
Miklatte for the EVO LTE-http://themikmik.com/showthread.php?14353-MikLatTE-v0-02-Updated-8-19-2012
MikG for the EVO 4g http://themikmik.com/showthread.php?10338-MikG-v3-11-3-9-2012
I really enjoy this quarterly installment as a way to calibrate what I know against the best. I do have a piece of feedback. The two 3.6 Sense ROM recommendations for the EVO 3D are both Virgin Mobile based with the Sprint Footprint added. Would be great to see a recommendation of a ROM based entirely on the Sprint RUU released a few weeks ago. Currently on Mean ROM ICS with latest HTC kernel. Thanks again!
Paul,
What I always have great trouble finding is a stock recovery image. I frequently see folks that are running stock ROM, but have followed instructions to flash CWM or TWRP as their recovery images. This prevents future OTA updates. If you had a link to where to obtain stock recovery, it would supplement your guide quite nicely!
Personally I have taken to just booting from a TWRP img rather than permanently flashing it to my device. That way I can take a Nandroid backup without inhibiting my ability to accept OTAs.
Hey K-Man, here’s what you would do if you’re S-ON:
Download the latest RUU (listed in the rom update utilities)
back up your stuff via recovery
lock the bootloader via “fastboot oem lock”
run the RUU
unlock / root
install recovery
restore
It’s under “update your radios/firmware without losing all your stuff” in the how-to
Yeah, that’s just a lot of steps compared to “fastboot flash recovery stock-recovery.img”. I’ve seen a lot of newbies in the forums follow instructions to root their phones by flashing CWM or TWRP in place of the stock recovery, which breaks the OTA function. All you need to accept OTA in this case is a reflash of the stock-recovery.img, which I’ve found, but not before hours of searching. Just offering a suggestion that if you offer links for folks to flash a 3rd party recovery partition, you should also offer a link to flash it back to stock.
hrmm, have a link for one handy?
Does anyone know if this method will work for the EVO 3D? http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1886460
Is the downgrade to 1.40.xxxx no longer valid if you are on 1.50.xxxx? I was planning on getting the wife’s phone rooted next week so I could flash a rooted version of the official Sprint ICS release (along with all new radios and firmware), but I haven’t been following the threads over at XDA.
Paul, thanks for the info. It is great to keep the list of links fresh for anyone looking to get started with rooting.
Thanks for this. I do see that since goodandevo was brought in to the fold, a lot less activity in this regard. Is this indicative of the reorganization or the activity level?
Forrest, G&E was purchased by Pocketables a long time before it moved over. If you take a look at the State of Root pieces, I do one roughly every 3 months.
Read the following with the understanding that I’m just writing this so it is out there and am not miffed peeved etc… people ask this and it’s a valid question.
There’re two editors for the past year and a quarter who write for G&E on a regular basis, me and John. I write 1-2 pieces a day usually EVO-specific, sometimes not so specific if nothing’s wowing me. John covers more of the “what Sprint is doing” and EVO product than “ways to achieve s-off by using a paperclip and spit” like I do, but…
Not much changes on how you root the 3D, 4G, V, Shift, Design, 4G LTE from week to week, And the number of ROMs that are the exact same except a version number change and a tweak or undoing a tweak just keeps on coming.
I scour twitter, 14 forum sites daily, google, and plenty of other places looking for new ROMs, kernels, root methods, etc. There just aren’t a lot of brand spanking new things any more… probably won’t be until CMX is completely working and then people are going to be sick of my ROM reviews.
Development is developing on CyanogenMod 10 across all the phones, but no EVO completely supports it without bugs or losing features from Sense, and as such there’ve not been a lot of fully functional wonderful spinoff ROMs out there to report on.
Last month I personally wrote 42 articles about RUU sites, new versions of recovery, OTA updates, ran a contest, new kernels, CMX development across 3 phones, a 3G hack for the LTE, flashing kernels when you’re S-ON, sales on 3D merch, several ROMs, differences between locked, unlocked, son and s-off, reviewed a ROM cleaner script, reported on the abandonment of CM9 and the development of CMX, wrote a what I’d like to see piece that ended up being adopted by a couple of development teams, and wrote about the ICS upgrade beatable hboot.
42 pieces over 23? week days (although one was for a flower pot for your iPhone and not on G&E microsite, so that might not count). That’s just what I wrote. John wrote I think more than I did and was on vacation for a week during that time.
The only thing the G&E side has stopped doing as much of is app reviews. Universally we were told that app filler content could be found anywhere, so personally I generally shy away from anything that is not specific to root although occasionally I’ll toss in an app I like or if someone requests an app review I’ll do it (tomorrow one is coming up).
But yeah, I’m not going to report every day when MeanROM releases a new update (they’re at update 43 since they started two months ago on the LTE) and I’m not going to write about a great ROM that will work great sometime down the road when someone fixes all the bugs with the hardware drivers.
This leaves us with roughly 20 things a month new to report on root wise. And since there’s not a lot of new hardware for the phones, we do cases and such as they come out. There’s not a lot of ‘em.
Anyway, that’s that…I’ve tried getting some developers to talk with me and do interviews on various occasions as people might be interested in what is actually involved in development, but that hasn’t panned out (anyone interested toss me a note at paul@pocketables.com) and talked to a couple of kernel devs both of who were too busy dealing with random stuff to handle a back and forth email interview…
So there’s that… there has been no change in the output that I produce. When Pocketables formatting and the merge happened my instructions were to follow a slightly different style guide and tag things differently and learn to properly cap WiMAX and WiFi. I don’t get a lot of people writing to me saying “hey, this neat thing is happening” – should you want to, paul@pocketables.com… or the tip us link.
feel free to let me know of anything we’re missing that’s amazing… I just can’t find any more than I’m writing about…
Excellent write up, thanks.
Thanks for writing, it’s very useful for me.
I’ve been thinking about playing around with this now that I don’t use my Evo 4G anymore. Thanks for the update.
I am really glad that you guys post these updates for the new root users to help them get to the point were I am now! This Site is what ultimately lead to me rooting my Evo… I should say good and evo was but nonetheless its one in the same now!
Maybe it’s time to root again. I haven’t rooted a phone in awhile.
so yeah, found a way to back up everything before destructively rooting a phone… can’t figure out why I didn’t see this before… writing it up, will be editing the root guide to include this (and some of the mik’s roms) later if all goes well.
Nice write up Paul. I used all this info about 3 months ago when I decided to root. I’m glad I did too. I was contemplating the last OTA and decided against it. I rooted and gained s-off. Couldn’t be happier with my Evo LTE.
Thanks very much for keeping this updated. I’ve been rooted for a long time, but it is very helpful to know what works and what’s current. I appreciate the time you put in to the whole site.
Love it when you guys do this.
Thank you!
Will RUU return me to stock everything, recovery s-on and so on. Like it was out of the box?
CAN SOMEONE PLEASE post a evo 3d stock rom download link i HATE using stock roms because of NO WIFI and i am NOT with a carrier because i dont know how to flash my phone to boost mobile and yes im on cdma
i ment custom roms
Paul, any word on a new ‘state-of-root’ article?
Working on it, been hoping for a breakthrough in the new HBOOT for the evo 4g lte attaining S-OFF, but seems like these things always happen the day after I post a state of root.
A good expectation would probably be 1/15/13 of when I’ll have time to update and check everything. I’m headed off with a couple of other Pocketables staff who I’ve never met or talked to other than via email to CES 2013 on Monday.
John will be manning Goodandevo alone for 4 days as I do gadget reports for Pocketables, Friday will most likely be the next ROM Dev spotlight and a ROM, Monday the 14th I expect to be hearing something astounding from Sprint (actually I just have a lot of work to do that will make me post late at night) which should leave Tuesday the 15th to get started on my 2013 root camp, which starts with updating the state of root.
Then again, I might get some energy and get it done tonight… but hoping by the 15th…
Thanks!
Heh…good thing you waited!
yup, Working on this today along with some CES stuff and a ROM I’m trying to get taken care of.
I knew if I wrote it up before I left it would be completely outdated by the time I got back
Was working on this tonight as a note, too much stuff changed… hopefully will be up by tomorrow
Ok Paul, I’m am not tech savy at all but what you are saying seems to b what is wrong with my phone. My hotspot hasn’t worked in a month and I think your saying it’s broken. Been on the phone with Virgin more than I can count on my toes. I’ve had my phone HTC EVO 3D For 6 mths,never had a problem until Sprint did its updates in the Boston- Providence area. Should I root my phone whatever that means? I do pay forhotspot and use it quit a bit. I love this phone but have always felt that I am not getting what I really should be getting out of it? Sperry about the long message. Please,I need advice! Thank you!
Where am I saying your hotspot is broken?
Sprint’s been doing updates on their towers, rooting won’t change anything. If you’re paying for hotspot and not getting it, it’s time to march into a store and make them fix it.
You can root your phone, which involves a fairly long series of instructions which this covers in some detail, but if you’re paying for a service and not getting it that’s not a root-fixing problem.
This guide is only for CDMA or GSM HTC EVO 3D?
thank you very much
1) this is an old guide, there’s a newer one
2) most of it works for the GSM other than the CDMA toolkit and some of the ROMs