I’m sure there are many folks out there who, within 10 minutes of cracking open the cellophane wrapping on their phone’s box, are researching how to gain root access. This can be a daunting process for the uninitiated, but great mobile unlocking site theunlockr.com recently posted a guide that simplifies the process greatly:-

1. On your phone (G2/HTC Hero), goto Settings, Applications, and make sure Unknown source is checked ON.

2. On your phone, goto Settings, SD card and phone storage, and click Unmount SD card.

3. Then click Format SD card (it should automatically remount after this).

4. Plug the phone into the compuer via USB, then pull down the notification bar and click on the SD card notification. Then click mount.

5. Download this APK and recovery image and save it to your computer:

FlashRec.apk
Cyanogen’s Hero Recovery Image

6. Extract the cm-hero-recovery.img out of the MoDaCoPatchedRecovery-1.0.zip and put it somewhere on your computer.

7. Save both the cm-hero-recovery.img and the FlashRec.apk to your computer, then copy them both to your SD card (do NOT put them inside any folders on the SD card, just put them on the SD card itself).

8. Unplug the phone from the computer once they are downloaded to the SD card.

8. Goto the Market and download Linda File Manager or any file manager program if you do not already have one.

9. Open the file manager and goto SDCard and then find the FlashRec apk file and click it. If asked tell it to use Package Installer to open it. It should automatically install the apk.

10. Open the FlashRec program and click on Backup Recovery Image and wait for it to finish.

11. Once done, click on the empty text box in the FlashRec program and type:

sdcard/cm-hero-recovery.img

Then click on the Flash Custom RecoveryImage button and wait for it to finish.

12. Turn off the phone and turn it on into Recovery mode by holding down Home and Power to turn it on (keep holding until the recovery screen comes up has a bunch of text on a black background). So long as that screen comes up, you have done it correctly and can now go on to the How to Load a ROM video for your appropriate device!

The original post, along with a great video of the whole process can be found here. I’d advise you to watch the video a couple of times before going through the process, just so you’re comfortable with all of the steps.

And, now that you’ve rooted your Hero, and before making any potentially damaging changes, it might be an idea to take a full backup of the ROM using Nandroid.

There is a list of custom ROMs for a number of different Android devices at our Custom ROMs section which can be found on the navigation bar under the site banner.