Windows 8 brought some rooting HTC fastboot problems
I’ve been seeing some scattered reports of people with Windows 8 having issues obtaining the token needed to unlock their phones via HTCDev’s official method. The command that generally things get hung up on is step 8 in the HTCDev unlock instructions: fastboot oem get_identifier_token.
The problem seems to exist when the cable is plugged into a USB 3.0 port, and the driver for that port is using Microsoft’s default chipset driver for USB 3.0 – a reader pointed this out in the comments of our Sense 5 preview . This has evidently been a problem for a while, but since most of the EVOs out there are already unlocked and S-OFFed, it took me a while to hear of fixes for it in the HTC One community.
There are currently three solutions to the problem; the easiest is to go to another computer that’s not running Windows 8 and execute the fastboot commands. But if that’s not an option, you can plug the USB cable into a USB hub or a 2.0 port, if you have one available. This generally isn’t going to be an option, but I thought I would list it so I could have three options and sound cool.
The third option, which fixes the problem with Windows 8 itself, involves downloading and installing an updated Intel chipset driver for the host controller that doesn’t have these problems. You can find a detailed description of how to install the driver and where to obtain it here. I’m not going to claim I’ve done the fix, as I don’t run Windows 8 on anything, so proceed at your own (probably minimal) risk.
Thanks to everyone who wrote in to tell me about the problem and the fixes!
[xda-developers]
