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First time rooter, a few questions

Hello everyone! I just decided the other day that I'm finally sick of how laggy my Hero can be, so I decided to go online and see if there were any ways to improve the performance of my phone. I didn't realize just how many communities and stuff there were out there dedicated to this sort of thing! Anyway, I decided that I would try to root my phone to overclock the processor to try to boost the performance of my phone. Before I start though, I have a few questions I want to ask:

1) Will this way of rooting work on my phone? I have a Sprint HTC Hero (the one that looks like this) and the build number on my phone is 2.27.651.6.

2) If that will work, once I get it rooted what is the first thing I should do? I keep reading about something called "Nandroid" but I'm not sure what it is...

3) What new ROMs should I install? I like the interface on my hero, and from what I've read it looks like something called Fresh would be one that I'm looking for to increase performance while still keeping the same interface?

Thanks for any help, I really appreciate it! I hate bugging you guys since you probably get 100 of these threads a day, but I just really don't want to mess my phone up and you guys seemed like you were a friendly bunch. :)
 
1) with that build no it will not allow you to root. you need to run a file called ruu, which you do similar to running htc sync. think of it as an upgrade in the reverse direction.

2) nandroid back up is basically like system restore on your computer. every thing on the phone is saved exactly the way it is, your apps, everything. it is stored on the sd card. you do this before you install ANY rom. say for some reason you got a bad download, or it was mislabeled or for whatever reason the phone can't boot after you flash your rom. you do a nandroid restore from the back up file you just created and everything goes back to before you wiped. i've even used it just cause i said "this isn't user friendly and i don't like it" to get back.

3) the interface on your phone right now is called htc sense. it's comparable to windows, from the aspect of windows, mac, linux. fresh uses a very sense like format, and a lot of the stock sense widgets and things. cm6 for example uses adw launcher, which you can get without rooting if you want to try it.

also keep in mind, you stated you wanted to overclock your cpu. well if you don't set it to underclock say when the screen is off, it will still be overclocked when it's not doing anything, and will suck your battery faster than a $10 hooker.

there are some things you can try before rooting to decrease lag. first off the phone needs to be restarted every now and again, maybe every other day. delete your old messages, call logs, emails, etc. everything the phone has to load to do things. lemme know if you still have any questions, you picked the right place for info on this topic. there are lots of threads that do have this already explained, seek and ye shall find.
 
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1) with that build no it will not allow you to root. you need to run a file called ruu, which you do similar to running htc sync. think of it as an upgrade in the reverse direction.

2) nandroid back up is basically like system restore on your computer. every thing on the phone is saved exactly the way it is, your apps, everything. it is stored on the sd card. you do this before you install ANY rom. say for some reason you got a bad download, or it was mislabeled or for whatever reason the phone can't boot after you flash your rom. you do a nandroid restore from the back up file you just created and everything goes back to before you wiped. i've even used it just cause i said "this isn't user friendly and i don't like it" to get back.

3) the interface on your phone right now is called htc sense. it's comparable to windows, from the aspect of windows, mac, linux. fresh uses a very sense like format, and a lot of the stock sense widgets and things. cm6 for example uses adw launcher, which you can get without rooting if you want to try it.

also keep in mind, you stated you wanted to overclock your cpu. well if you don't set it to underclock say when the screen is off, it will still be overclocked when it's not doing anything, and will suck your battery faster than a $10 hooker.

there are some things you can try before rooting to decrease lag. first off the phone needs to be restarted every now and again, maybe every other day. delete your old messages, call logs, emails, etc. everything the phone has to load to do things. lemme know if you still have any questions, you picked the right place for info on this topic. there are lots of threads that do have this already explained, seek and ye shall find.

1) Are you sure? In the thread about that way of rooting people were saying that it was working even with the .6 version, that's why I posted it in here.

2) Oh okay, cool. Is that something I'll need to download after I root it then?

3) Alrighty, well I like HTC Sense so I think I'll go with Fresh then.

So for the overclocking will there be programs that I can download which will let me set how fast the processor is supposed to run both for when the screen is on and when it's off? So that whenever I turn the screen on it speeds up and whenever the screen turns off it automatically slows itself down.
 
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muzikman, andy's right. you have to root. froyo is one of the many rom's out there.

one guy,
1) yes i did this to my phone. had .6, ran the ruu to get back to .5, and rooted. tried it with .6 before i discovered this and it wouldn't install the superuser permissions.

2) negative. when you boot to the recovery screen it will be an option on the menu, under "backup/restore".

3) fresh is what i have, and i have no complaints. but it is personal opinion. kind of like you don't buy a car everyone else likes, you buy a car that you like and is practical for your needs. another sense rom is zenxp, though i haven't really messed with that one.

4) i use overclock widget from the market. it does just that, set the frequencies you want the clock at while screen on, and set what you want them at when screen off. there's also others out there you can pay for but that one's free. setcpu seems to be widely accepted and used, and it think it's somewhere in the 2.99 range.
 
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Alright well I just rooted my phone, did the nandroid backup and everything. I'm sure there's an obvious answer for this that I can't seem to find, but whenever I try to go to the Market it says "A network error has occurred. Retry, or cancel and return to the previous screen." Is this normal?

Edit: Never mind, a reboot fixed it
 
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Okay so I got it rooted and now I'm looking to overclock it. I think I'm gonna go with Fresh 2.4, so I've downloaded that but I'm pretty sure that I need to download a kernel or something which will let me overclock it? I got overclock widget as well and I was wondering, once I get the Fresh stuff all figured out, what settings you use?
 
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Okay so I got it rooted and now I'm looking to overclock it. I think I'm gonna go with Fresh 2.4, so I've downloaded that but I'm pretty sure that I need to download a kernel or something which will let me overclock it? I got overclock widget as well and I was wondering, once I get the Fresh stuff all figured out, what settings you use?

Which settings should you use? Settings will vary from phone to phone, one thing I will say is see of your phone can handle 768, if not go down....
 
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andy:
i read a thread yesterday, stating that 710 MHz is the fastest that the cdma htc hero can handle with any stability. i use 528 on mine and haven't felt the need to go any higher.

oneguy:
if you're using oc widget then that does the oc'n for you and there's no need to download anything else. and to what settings would you be referring?
 
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andy:
i read a thread yesterday, stating that 710 MHz is the fastest that the cdma htc hero can handle with any stability. i use 528 on mine and haven't felt the need to go any higher.

oneguy:
if you're using oc widget then that does the oc'n for you and there's no need to download anything else. and to what settings would you be referring?

Not true, I've been at 768 since the 810 nightly with no isssues at all. That is why I wrote, give 768 a try first and see if your phone can handle it. Some can, some can't
 
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I have an Eris with plainjane t2 I just got the overclocl widget I have it set at 710 where should it run and how do I know if the phone can handle it

On the overclock widget what is your min and max settings? Unless you flash an oc'ed kernel, the max settings more likely at 710.

For instance, if you flash the RC1 CM6, and download the oc widget from the market, the max settings in the oc widget would be 691. If you flash one of the uncapped kernels from Decadance, your max settings would 768. But again, if you set your max settings at 768 and random reboots or other things begin to happen, lower the max to 745, and so on until your phone finds that 'happy' min/max setting
 
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Okay so I got it rooted and now I'm looking to overclock it. I think I'm gonna go with Fresh 2.4, so I've downloaded that but I'm pretty sure that I need to download a kernel or something which will let me overclock it? I got overclock widget as well and I was wondering, once I get the Fresh stuff all figured out, what settings you use?


OK since your a new rooter, Fresh is a very good beginners rom. It's very user friendly and very similar to HTC sense which I'm sure your used to. When I first rooted I was on Fresh2.0d and moved to many different roms on the way. Once you get familiar with customizing your phone OCing, flashing different lock screens, Live Wallpapers, then you can move to more technical roms like Cyanogen CM6 (Froyo), Zenulators Zenexp, Nfinites NFXhero etc....etc. Remember to ALWAYS nandroid before switching roms. Also read every detail that a Dev gives you about their rom. I'm on Nfinites NFXHero2.2.1 using LauncherPro, OCed to 748mhz, and Jitted. Very close to Froyo speed wise. Goodluck on your newly rooted phone. Don't be afraid to ask question.
 
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Alright well I had it rooted and working fine, so I went to install Fresh 2.4, downloaded from here. I did everything it said to do (wiped data/factory reset and dalvik cache), then went to flash the rom, but got the error

"E:Corrupt file: sdcard/fresh-removed-apks/HtcFootprints.apk
E:Verification Failed
Installation aborted."

So I tried to do a nandroid restore, but when I got the phone started back up everything would just crash and I wasn't even able to get to the main menu. I'm dowloading a new version of Fresh and hoping that I can get a new version onto my phone, but since I can't even get to the point where I can make my phone mounted as a disk drive I'm really not sure what to do. Did I just kill my phone?
 
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What is an "ruu" and how do I downgrade from .6 to .5 since I obviously need to in order to root my Sprint Hero?

Also... If I root my phone and need to take it to Sprint for service, will they be able to tell that it's been rooted even if I unroot it?

look at this [GUIDE] How to Root Sprint 2.1 Release for CDMA Hero - xda-developers

I doubt it but I probably would not take the chance, after you root just make a nandroid of your stock rom or run the official RUU(Rom Upgrade Utility) from the Sprint or HTC website
 
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