How to finish rooting the HTC One M8
Yesterday I wrote about rooting the HTC One M8, but left it with the system partition unwritable and BusyBox uninstallable. For most people rooting, this would not be an issue, but if you’re looking to do something like WiFi tether or any application that’s going to require write access to /system, you’re going to need to do a few more steps on the stock ROM.
It should be noted if you’ve flashed a custom ROM, you don’t need to do any of this most likely, as the developer will have done the work for you. This being the first week of release of the One M8 there are still tiny hurdles for the root crowd.
Install a flashable BusyBox
You may have noticed when attempting to install Buybox from any installer in the market that it would fail. You’ll need a flashable version of this installed, which you can grab here. Should you need a Busybox flashable for other devices, here’s a good list of flashable BusyBoxen.
You’ll simply download and flash that file via recovery. Nothing too fancy for root users here.
Install an unsecured boot.img with init.d support
In this case, “unsecured” only means that the /system is writable, although in theory anyone who gives you a modified kernel could do whatever they want with it. The boot.img contains your kernel and ramdisk, in case you’re wondering.
You can get Captain_Throwback’s unsecured boot image here.
What I did was unzip the boot.img from the zip, copy it into my directory containing fastboot, and “fastboot flash boot boot.img” although there are other ways to do this listed. I’ll admit at the time of this writing I don’t know the correct image name for bootloader flashing yet – i.e. “PG86IMG.ZIP” was for one of my old EVOs.
Profit
As a root user of an M8, you’re 17 times cooler than your unrooted brethren, but more useful is the ability to schedule nandroid backups, install custom kernels (which should be out shortly due to HTC’s unprecedented move to release the source code in a timely fashion), and change what your device reports to Google Play so you can download applications that don’t know they’ll work on your phone but will – I’m looking at you FitBit.
