Rooting your Galaxy S

The process of "rooting" gives you the highest level of access to your device. This is particularly useful if you wish to modify files that is within the device which is deemed "restricted". With the highest level of access, you now can make use of applications that can:-

• Change your sim card region code and download market apps that is only available to other parts of the world
• Increase performance of your device using swap memory
• Perform low level backup of applications and data.
• Tweak your device memory parameter
• etc..

Apart from gaining the "root access", you will also be installing 2 other softwares together with it.

Disclaimer:-

• You must understand that rooting your device would (again) void your warranty with Samsung. However you can flash another official ROM and making it unroot again. There are also ways to unroot without having to flash your device but that wont be covered in my guide here.
• The links and methods provided by this guide is not forever permanent. It is available as of the time this blog is being published

Steps:-

1. Download the zip file from here
2. Rename the file to "update.zip"
3. Copy the file into your SDCard ROOT directory (You can choose mount your SDCard or use a card reader)
4. Shutdown your phone
5. Boot into recovery mode - Hold Vol+Up, ACTION, POWER buttons together, release the POWER button upon the first thing you see on screen; keep holding the other 2 buttons. Once you see recovery mode, release the remaining 2 buttons
6. From the recovery menu, select "Apply sdcard:update.zip" (navigate using the Vol+Up or Vol+Down button and ACTION button to select)
7. Your device will apply the zip file and reboot automatically. Your device should be rooted.

Testing using adb:-

1. From command prompt, launch adb and go into your device. Run "adb shell" (without quotes)
2. Once you have the $ prompt, type "su" (without quotes)
3. Your device should be asking for SuperUser permission. Just reply YES and you should be getting a # prompt now

The update file contains 3 files to be installed into your device

• su - the command to gain superuser access. Installed into /system/xbin
• superuser.apk - the application which allows you to control which other application can have root access
• busybox.apk - an application that allows you to run other linux commands (like mkfs, tail, mkswap... etc) that is not available in Android OS natively