[HTC Desire S] twiice:
My Experience with S-OFF

First of all I want to thank Jack_R1 for his input and wisdom, even though I didn't really understand some things he mentioned, it all made sense in the end) as well as kyeeliu for his comments.

At first I didn't really trust many guides enough to follow possibly bricking my phone. I see too many people[READ:Beginners] with opinions and problems because some guides are not explained from a beginner point of view often offering instructions but little in the way of explanations for steps...., but in all fairness, this is also due to inexperience, or the users own failure to to make sure they followed everything correctly. Such is life...All in all happy to HAVE Guides, we can't really complain, just feel lucky ppl take time to write. And writing in DEPTH is bloody tiring when you hate typing as I do...:p

I believe NOONE should be attempting, however, to mess with their phone's inner workings until they've tried their best to assimilate all the information they can[ie:SEARCH]. I know it's time consuming and frustrating sometimes, but that onus is on you when you chose to 'take the plunge' so to speak..

I read for so many hours, wading through a disorganised sea of excited opinions READ:misinformation, good advice and hidden gems, but I was unable to discern what was best simply because I only had opinions and a sense of logic to dissasemble everything. In the end I followed a guide HERE by Skanob, it worked A-OK!

So this this is my Story of how I S-OFFED my Phone. By NO means extraordinary, :laugh:

Desire S - S-ON - HBOOT 2.00.0002 - CM7 ROM[Reaper 3.0]

*Note: I nandroid restored my original rooted rom first*

First of all the RUU. Noobspeak: It's just a version of your phones operating system in installer format, just like Windows XP is different[read:updated] to Windows 7, so is 1 RUU from another. Some are branded (have the carrier's logo) some are not (unbranded) Mine in particular was unbranded.

First you need to find out YOUR phones RUU, so to do this reboot your phone into Bootloader - Fastboot and then open command prompt on your PC and navigate to where you have adb and fastboot files located (I have copies of these files in windows\system32\ folder. When there type C:\WINDOWS\system32>fastboot getvar all. In this list of information look for these:

INFOversion-main: '2.15.1113.2' (and) INFOcidnum: 'HTC__053'

version-main is your phones current operating system version CID is your particular phones region(eg: HTC__058 = Thailand)

So This was my phone's current RUU:

RUU_Saga_S_HTC_Thailand_2.15.1113.2_Radio_20.4801.30.0822U_3822.10.08.04_M_release_226808_signed.exe

My current version has HBOOT 2.00.0002. I will need to downgrade this number to 98.00.000. I can do this by installing an older RUU that has HBOOT (98.00.000) I didn't know WHICH RUU that was so I just looked for an older RUU done by checking my current version_main '2.15.1113.2' and looking for something lower. I found: [RUU_Saga_HTC_Thailand_1.35.1113.2_Radio_20.28d.30.0805U_3805.04.02.01_M_release_183327_signed.exe]

I wasn't sure which HBOOT was inside (silly me) so i ran the installer just letting the first screen open up (which extracts all the files from the RUU to temp) and going NO further.. After that I went to 'Run' and typed in %temp% and looked for a recent folder with a long name which had the contens of the installer extracted. Amongst these files I found 'rom.zip' I opened it and inside could see the HBOOT file version 98.00.000_'other numbers'. This was my ticket :highfive: lol...

Now because my stock ROM was already rooted and I had previously flashed recovery all I needed to do was the -Modify the version of your phone- step in Skanob's Guide: (obviously I downloaded the attached misc_version file and as instructed created a new folder on C: called 'downsaga' and dropped misc_version inside)

adb push C:\downsaga\misc_version /data/local/tmp
adb shell chmod 777 /data/local/tmp/misc_version
adb shell
su
cd /data/local/tmp
./misc_version -s 1.27.405.6
exit
exit

This part of the code

./misc_version -s [COLOR="Blue"]1.27.405.6[/COLOR]

sets your phone to accept any RUU with a higher version than that number. I had no idea which number to put there exactly so I used 1.27.405.6 as well, noting it was lower than the RUU version I was going to install[1.35.1113.2] So it would be accepted.

Later Jack_R1 advised me to put 1.00.000 instead, and as he stated, "you can't go wrong". :good:

After setting the new version, I Re-locked my phone via command again using fastboot oem lock. I do not need root privileges anymore as I have already changed my misc_version [lower version] And the RUU installation needs phone to be relocked again before proceeding.

After that it's simply connect your phone to the PC and run the installer:

[RUU_Saga_HTC_Thailand_1.35.1113.2_Radio_20.28d.30.0805U_3805.04.02.01_M_release_183327_signed.exe]

I now had HBOOT 98.00.000. After that, a trip to http://revolutionary.io/ to S-OFF, and flash recovery file. If you choose during the S-OFF process to not install recovery you can do it manually afterwards as I did(I used recovery-clockwork-5.0.2.0-saga.img, because for some reason I got an error trying to flash 4EXT_Recovery_v2.2.7_RC5 which I previously had) Then I simply dropped Superuser-3.0.7-efghi-signed.zip on my SDCARD and installed via recovery, all done. Nandroid restore of my CM7, and that was it...

I remember many weeks ago just trying to achieve root was bewildering, trying superoneclick and 1 or 2 others methods that also failed me. Only to find all i had to do was flash a recovery file in fastboot, then install superuser. ... all the time I wasted...lolz.. thx to n0elite for that http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1525100

On a side note: Please think again before reporting an error, and retrace your footsteps first. I have seen people reporting errors in forum such as: can't re-unlock my phone(yes, with the same Unlock_code.bin) simply because they were unwittingly in HBOOT instead of FASTBOOT, etc....

Now I'm well aware I could have done 'this or done 'that' etc differently and saved time etc..blah blah, and opions are welcome. I did not ,however, write this as a step-by-step Guide. Only as my personal experience, and yes, to many seasoned members minds I may have over explained, but this is because your so 733T :p and obviously I'm a slow learner perhaps, but I was mind-boggled so tried to write this from my own perspective as a 'virgin' flasher.

Peace!

twIIce