I imaged my development phone with the Android 1.5 images from HTC. I was able to su to root when I connected to the phone using “adb shell”, but wasn’t able to get root when using the terminal app on the phone itself. There’s nothing that keeps you from setting up a mechanism to get root from the handset though. Just do this from an adb shell session after you su to root:

  • mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system
  • cd /system/bin
  • cat sh > usu
  • chmod 4755 usu

Some of the instructions I found online suggested just calling the new binary su, but I was concerned about that overriding the default su depending on what path is getting used. So I just created a whole name “user su” which won’t reject the handset user when I try to change to root:

terminal_root_rotated