Let's start off with something simple.

First things first, we're going to be talking about "rooting."  Rooting your HTC Hero means that You will go through the process of gaining complete and full control over your phone- such as removing the Sprint applications it shipped with that you don't use. In order to root your phone, there's a very simple application you can use if your version number is 2.27.651.5. If your version number ends in .6, We'll go over how to root it in the next post.


Step 1: Download the Android SDK here

Step 2: Extract the Android SDK zip. Move the contents of the extracted zip to C:\
Your Android tools folder path should now be C:\android-sdk-windows\tools

Step 3: Download HTC Sync 2.0.33 here
Run the installer, and reboot your computer when it is finished. Move on to step 4 once rebooted.

Step 4: Download the hero-root.zip. This zip contains everything you need to root your Hero.
(md5: c6e5058ed14f71c68fb099e10be142fb)

Step 5: Extract the 3 files inside hero-root.zip to the C:\android-sdk-windows\tools folder on your computer. 

Step 6: Make sure USB Debugging is ON (checked) on your Hero. Go to Settings > Applications > Development > and make sure it is checked.



Step 7: Plug your phone into the computer via USB, Make sure that the connection type in the Notification Pull-Down Bar is "Charge Only", not "Disk Drive" or else this won't work.
If your computer asks you to restart after the new drivers were installed, do that now.



Step 8: Open a Command Prompt window by clicking the Start button and typing cmd into the search box and pressing enter.
It is also found under Start Menu > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt



Step 9: You will now enter the commands followed by pressing ENTER, one code at a time.
You may also copy/paste these commands in to the Command Prompt, pressing ENTER after each, one at a time.

1.  cd C:\android-sdk-windows\tools
2. adb devices
3. adb push unrevoked /sdcard
4. adb push recovery.img /sdcard
5. adb push boot-patched.zip /sdcard

Time to run the exploit.

1. adb shell
2. sh /sdcard/unrevoked

Give it a minute or so, and you should see

 $ sh /sdcard/unrevoked
          sh /sdcard/unrevoked
          Unpacking, please wait...
      
          88   88 88b 88 88""Yb 888888 88 dP dP"Yb  88  dP 888888 8888b.
          88   88 88Yb88 88__dP 88__   88dP dP   Yb 88odP  88__    8I  Yb
          Y8   8P 88 Y88 88"Yb  88""   8dP  Yb   dP 88"Yb  88""    8I  dY
          `YbodP' 88  Y8 88  Yb 888888 YP    YbodP  88  Yb 888888 8888Y
      
          ==================================================================
      
          unrEVOked: root for HTC evo and hero (http://unrevoked.com)
      
          #

Now in your app drawer on your phone, you should seea "super user permissions" app.

Back in the sommand prompt, type in

1. su

And your phone should pop up asking to give /system/bin/sh privledges. Tap allow. Congratulations, you're now rooted! In the next post I'll go over how to root if your version number is .6, and also how to install a recovery image.