5How to Root the HTC Desire HD & install a custom ROM

I’ve recently been asked to root a HTC Desire HD and put a cus­tom ROM onto it.  I agreed to, des­pite some reluct­ance — hack­ing my own HTC Desire was quite a hassle and involved lots of research and con­sid­er­able time.  I was delighted to dis­cov­er the pro­cess for the Desire HD is much sim­pler!  A tool called the “Advanced Ace Hack Kit” has been cre­ated which car­ries out a root and S‑Off auto­mat­ic­ally with 1 click (but read the manu­al first).  The kit also installs Clock­work­Mod recov­ery and ROM Man­ager.  This pro­ced­ure did­n’t even wipe any­thing on the phone!  I was then able to install the ROM of choice (Vir­tu­ous Affin­ity 1.46 based on Sense 3.5 with Android 2.3.5 Ginger­bread) via ROM Man­ager, again with min­im­al hassle, and again without los­ing any of the installed apps or set­tings.  The whole pro­cess took less than 30 minutes.  The bene­fits are many: longer bat­tery life, faster per­form­ance, and sev­er­al nice UI cus­tom­isa­tion options.

Root the Desire HD

Down­load the Advanced Ace Hack Kit from the link above.  Extract it to a new folder, without inter­fer­ing with the folder struc­ture.  Remove any install­a­tions of HTC Sync or HTC drivers.  Install the HTC drivers included with the hack (from the tools\windrivers folder).  Con­nect the phone and make sure it is set to USB Char­ger mode only.  Enable USB Debug­ging on the phone (set­tings, applic­a­tions, devel­op­ment).  Right click on the hack-ace.cmd file and select “run as admin­is­trat­or”.  Fol­low the prompts.  You will need a pass­word which is gen­er­ated each time — you can find a link to it at the bot­tom of the manu­al (the manu­al is included with the down­load and is called effen-manual.html).  Wait for about 15 minutes and sev­er­al reboots and all will be done.

Update Rom

Once rooted, let the phone boot up, go to the mar­ket app, and install ROM Man­ager.  Run and enable ROM man­ager.  Down­load a ROM of your choice either through ROM Man­ager or manu­ally on your PC.  If manu­ally, copy the down­load to your phone memory card.  Use ROM man­ager to reboot in recov­ery and fol­low the menu options to flash zip from sd card.  Wait for 5–10 minutes (and sev­er­al reboots) for the ROM to install.  All done!

The kit can also be run under Linux and OS X, although my instruc­tions don’t cov­er that.

For me the new ROM is work­ing excep­tion­ally well, it is faster and less bat­tery intens­ive than the ori­gin­al, offi­cial HTC ROM.  It also has nicer eye candy.

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.

-Upd Aug-2012-

Updated links to AAHK and Affin­ity Rom

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