Taking the plunge: rooting the Desire HD

General

Well, I have finally made the change and have rooted my phone using the excellent and stupidly easy to use Ace Hack Kit.  Having done this, I also found a hint that I can return it to stock if I really need to.  El Presidente at androidforums.com has been very helpful.  Some pages of use for future reference:

I am currently working through the steps making backups and backing up my backups.I am probably confusing myself, but I will soon be moving to CyanogenMod 7.1.  I used it on my HTC Hero whilst my phone was being repaired and really liked it.  It should fly on the beefier Desire HD.  I am hoping for better battery life with the new setup.  I still sometimes have days where I am dead before 5pm, particularly if I am not at home for the day.

Now I understand a little more (oops) I realise that I should have rooted my phone when it was in its pure Orange state, since that would give me a stock ROM to return too (not sure how you put back the old recovery mode but I think that link above answers that question.  I’d have backed up the stock Orange ROM, now I will be backing up the old HTC ROM that I am using that does not match my phone’s CID (Carrier ID, which in my case is ORANG001).

I’ve just hit reboot to recovery.  More to follow.

    More rumination about rooting my Desire HD

    General

    I still hum and hah about rooting my Desire HD.  I used a Gold Card to take it off Orange UK and install the generic HTC ROM, but wonder whether rooting would make the Gold Card unnecessary.  I have not really got a handle on what a Gold Card actually is yet, so am pasting my research here:

    androidtipsnapps.com tells me what a Gold Card is:

    A GoldCard is a special SD card which, when inserted into your device, allows you to flash RUU files with a different CID to your own device. For example, if you own a T-Mobile branded device, this will allow you to flash a generic ROM.

    A bit of googling of CID tells me it is Carrier ID, and xda-developers has two useful entries:

    CID

    The CID (Carrier ID) of the device is a setting which determines which carrier ROMs should be allowed to run on the device, a table of valid CIDs can be found in the wiki pages. All bootloaders (apart from HardSPL and SSPL) will only allow a ROM with the correct CID to be flashed onto the device. A device which has been CID unlocked will have SuperCID which allows ANY ROM to be loaded onto the device, SuperCID also unlocks the Ext_ROM and allows it to be mounted.

    CID Unlock

    Load any carrier ROM (in any language) on the device.

    Which leads me to suspect that I should be looking for CID Unlocking.  Is that different from SIM locking?  xda came to my aid again but this does not tell me whether I need a gold card once I have rooted the phone.  I then finally did the obvious:

    androidcentral.com suggested that you don’t need a gold card after rooting as did addictivetips.com.

    I’m still left with the dilemma of whether to root it or not though. 🙁