1How to: Root the Samsung Galaxy Note 2

As I’ve noted before pretty much the first thing I do when I get a new phone is root it.  This time around its the turn of my part­ners Galaxy Note 2.  Below I will sum­mar­ise the steps which are very sim­il­ar to those I used for my own Sam­sung Galaxy S3.

1. Make sure the phone drivers are installed.  You can do this by installing Sam­sung Kies, or you can get the drivers on their own from xda-developers.
2. I recom­mend installing Kies — as you may as well update to the latest release at the same time.  Kies can take quite a long time to install, and seemed to me to go into a “hot­fix” loop, but I was patient enough for it to com­plete successfully
3. Press and hold the vol down, home and power but­tons, for approx 20 sec, until the phone enters down­load mode, with text which starts “warn­ing”.  Press the up vol to continue.
4. Down­load the latest cf-auto-root for the Note 2 from chain­fire (update 11-Dec-2012: cf-auto-root has replaced cf-root)
5. Down­load odin3 3.04 from xda-developers.
6. Con­nect the phone cable to the PC and run odin.  You should get a yel­low box
7. Click on PDA and point to the down­loaded chain­fire file — in TAR format (if its still a zip you’ll need to extract the TAR from inside the zip)
8. Click start
9. The pro­cess should take about a minute

Once you’re up and run­ning take a look at my list of recom­men­ded android apps which is updated every 6 months or so.  See the related posts sec­tion below for the latest version.