[Shield Tablet Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] mcord11758:
I am familiar with android but I just purchased this tablet for my son for Christmas. he is 7 and I would not let him mess around with rooting or anything like that but I wanted the tablet to be ready to roll when he opened it on Christmas. I just received it on Sunday. This is what I did

I have a 64gb Samsung Class 10 sd that I formatted to NTFS and placed in tablet

Tablet came with Kit Kat. I used Towel Root to root and Flashify to flash Phil's Recovery. I chose this recovery because I have read that CWM has issues sticking with Lolipop.

Once I had recovery I went into recovery and did a backup to my external sd of my current setup just in case anything went wrong I could restore as long as I could still get into recovery

The tablet had 2 OTA updates to install so I let them both. I intended on unlocking my bootloader although I could of opted to not do so because I was rooted on Kit Kat. Having an unlocked bootloader gives you a better chance to recover in the case that something goes wrong. Yes it "voids" warranty although there has been some debate on if Nvidia will hold that against you as long as it is a hardware problem or if the bootloader is flagged once unlocked because you can always re lock it. It wipes your device but does not remove NVidia apps

I had ADB on my PC but it was not a version that liked my tablet. I had to download the minimal ADB package in order to communicate with my shield. I got the drivers from Nvidia and followed their instructions on making sure the tablet found it. Once connected I ran some simple commands to make sure the 2 devices communicated.

I followed unlock procedure then I flashed Phil's recovery following the instructions to flash CMW form the thread in development. Then selected recovery from bootloader menu. Once in recovery I did another backup to my external sd.

I could of downloaded the flashable supersu zip and push to my device via adb but instead I decided to just boot my tablet at that point. I downloaded the latest version of the flashable supersu zip and then put my tablet into recovery

I realized that my tablet no longer had phils recovery, possibly because I did not root so I had to go back to bootloader to flash recovery again then I flashed supersu and rebooted

I went to app store and downloaded foldermount and opened the app to make sure my device can write correctly to my external sd

all is well and I am rooted with full access to my external sd. Side note you need to go to app store to download the new Nvidia Hub. The one that was on my tablet did not have Grid on it and I was scratching my head a bit

not everything I did was needed it was just the steps I took to make myself comfortable. Unlocking or rooting your tablet alone will not kill your device. I opted to unlock because the version of supersu for lolipop is relatively new and although no real issues have been reported what if I flash it and I get boot loops? No I am panicking trying to get ADB/Fastboot to see my device so that I can unlock my bootloader. I wanted to make sure I could establish a connection between the devices prior so I knew I could make corrections if needed

I did not take the time to link anything and it is all there to be found but if you can not find something ask away