[Desire Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] mysteryfr:
SOLVED

Thanks guys. I already solved all problems. It was horribly difficult to get over all these pit falls but finally I reached my goal (a Titanium Backup).

What caused me most trouble was the unclear description of Titanium Backup, especially the part in which they state "if whoami does not respond so and so you are not root"... BULL****!!!

"Short" list of how I got my Desire with HBOOT 0.98 rooted and installed Titanium Backup:

Unrevoked root, but not the latest version 3.32. This one will stop with an Error: Cannot get root. Is your firmware too new? or something similar. Instead use version 3.2

Install Titanium and start it. Superuser will popup and ask for permissions - grant.

Make the changes in the application settings that Titanium asks for (I think usb debugging and allow applications that are not from market) and forget about the message telling you you have no sufficient root privileges, that is not true - I guess what they really mean is that busybox is not installed on your system (would be nice if they'd said what they mean).

Go to the "Problems?" button and let Titanium install Busybox.

... not over yet!

Titanium will now not complain about root privileges any longer but you will still not see any application listings in the software. So maybe there is still something wrong. But what could that be? The root priviliges? WRONG!. Titanium downloaded busybox but did not bother to also install it, although it said it did ;-)

Get the android SDK from Google and install it. (you will also need the Java JDK). You can uncheck most of the packages during installation, probably all. We are only interested in the adb tool that is included in the base installation (I think it is, I also installed the Android SDK Platform tools, SDK Tools and SDK Platform Android 2.2 - just because I was not sure about it).

Boot phone into recovery and connect with the adb shell. (this is a little tool that you will find in the tools subdirectory in the android sdk. You need to start it from the command prompt)

Once connected you need to install busybox manually. Titanium did download the data but did not install! How to do this is described by Loccy here:

Actually, what I did was use Titanium's busybox:

* install Titanium
* run Titanium
* click the "problems" button and install Busybox
* boot into recovery
* adb shell from my Mac
* mount /system
* cp /data/data/com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup/files/busybox /system/bin
* cd /system/bin
* ./busybox --install -s .

Instead of using the mount commands, listed above I mounted the mentioned directories with the mount option in the ClockworkMod recovery menu, that comes with the unrevoked rooting, because the mount commands did not work properly for me. Also, I had to cd into the /data/data/com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup/files/busybox directory and copy busybox to /system/bin/. from there.

cd /data/data/com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup/files
cp busybox /system/bin/.
cd /system/bin
./busybox --install -s .

But I might have had a typo.

reboot the device and enjoy.

I should mention, if you NOW issue the suggested "su" and "whoami" commands in a shell that according to Titaniums super HOWTO should tell you if you have root privileges, THEN you will get the right response.

In Conclusion:

Forget about the Titanium howto. If Unrevoked finished with no error you HAVE root privileges, no matter what Titanium tells you. Another indicator: If the superuser popup appears, you should be rooted as well.

Install Busybox either completely manually or with the above described method via Titanium. The busybox setup has worked if you can issue the "su" and "whoami" command in a shell.

@EddyOS: "Noone" might not be entirely true - If Titanium was so clear you would not find tons of "how do I install it" questions in the forum. If it works on some *or most* devices but on others not, this is just an indication for sloppy coding. And a user should not have to spend hours over hours to surf some forums for solutions that should have been provided by the developers in the first place. Some people have a life...;)