[myTouch 3G Slide General] Phylum:
Hey 2Noob4U

I picked up 2 slides this weekend and had some difficulty getting mine rooted.

For starters it wasn't initially obvious that the Android software was necessary. This being my first Android device I wasn't aware I needed to download the Android SDK. Minor hurdle to overcome. The biggest issue was getting the Android ADB driver loaded properly in x86 Vista (32-bit). Windows would fail at finding drivers for 'Android 1.0'. I had already downloaded the Android SDK, complete with drivers, so I went for HTC Sync then the PDANet Android software, which didn't like that HTC Sync was installed so I removed it. After some magical procedure of installing one then the other then the other, and uninstalling HTC Sync(?), I rebooted,

which is key

, as someone/others have already noted. After the reboot, it finally worked. No errors in Device Management. I don't have the steps memorized - it was very clumsy and not methodical.

Second, I didn't like the fact that I had to split my attention between the computer screen and the phone so I modified the `adb devices` line in the batch file slightly to read

adb devices | find "HT"

This way it would only show something when the device is actually found, be it offline, in recovery or normal ('device'). This helped significantly as I could comfortably glance at the DOS window to see if it was in 'offline' mode or not.

Third, powering off and holding the power+vol down buttons to get to the bootloader was not ideal, in my humble opinion. So, instead of fussing with that, I decided to just use `adb` to reboot the phone into the proper mode

adb reboot bootloader
adb reboot recovery

From there I could get into the recovery mode GUI/menu by pressing vol up+power.

Lastly, the instructions and video are slightly different in that they both contain information that's missing in the other. For instance,

the post doesn't say anything about pushing vol up+power to get to the recovery screen, where you can select Update.zip from the meny but the video does, albeit quickly mentioned

the post says to type `adb push slideroot.zip` but that command won't work because it needs a destination; the video says to 'push it to the sdcard', so append '/sdcard' to the previous push command.

the post is a bit more clear about what to type and what you can expect to see on screen than the video.

Once I issued the `adb reboot recovery` command, it booted into recovery mode, I unplugged the USB cable from the phone and reconnected it to the phone, and adb found my device in recovery mode on the first try.

I've got another unrooted Slide and and Windows system, albeit x64 Windows 7 (64-bit), that doesn't have any Android drivers loaded so it should be a good test for nailing down the proper process for getting the drivers loaded.

If you want to discuss this further offline, PM me and I'll lend a hand.

For what its worth:

I'm in no way trying to slight the work of eugene373 or kingofyo1. I'm thankful they were willing to share these steps with the community and for taking the time to detail the process. For someone walking in cold it there were some unclear areas which made the process all the more frustrating. (I spent like 5 hours trying to get into 'recovery' mode. I expected to see a menu after Step 5 but instead I saw a picture of the phone with an orange or red triangle with an exclamation point in the middle. Thinking I did something wrong I retried over 2 dozen times double checking my work every step of the way and Googling 'orange triangle' to see what was going on. On a whim I decided to watch the video and bam that held the key: vol up+power)