A few months ago I made the switch from the iPhone to Android - a HTC Desire HD (DHD), to be precise. I'm still formulating a post about my experience of switching (and Android in general), but today I want to document the process I had to go through to "root" my phone. Rooting your device seems to be a right of passage for Android owners and being the geek I am I didn't want to miss out.

HTC recently released an OTA update for the Desire HD (v1.72) which locked down the phone to prevent "rooting" (jailbreaking by another name, as far as I can tell). I find it amusing that the "open" Android platform suffers from some of the same vendor lock-downs as Apple and the iPhone, but that's another post for another day. What I didn't find amusing was that this update hit my phone the morning I decided I wanted to root my handset.

Thankfully there is a large community of enthusiasts who dedicate their spare time to working around issues such as this. Within a week or so there was a workaround. What follows are the collated instructions I used to downgrade my DHD to a rootable firmware, apply the root, install a recovery image, and install a custom ROM. These instructions are pulled from a number of different forum threads and blog posts across the internet.

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