It’s only been two days since T-Mobile released the G2x and Sidekick 4G on the world, and both have been rooted already. While not as easy as the one-click root solution of the G2x, the Sidekick 4G’s root method doesn’t require too much know how to get things going.
If you’re new to hacking your phones in any way, you should first read the how to all the way through first, just to make sure you are comfortable with what you’re doing. You assume all responsibility for what you do to your handset, and it would be a sad day to find yourself with a new SideBrick 4G only days after getting it. Let’s get started.
We’re going to assume you have ADB correctly set up, and we won’t go into how you should go about doing it.
1. From the phone, go into Settings>Applications>Development and check USB Debugging.
2. Download and install the drivers, (the Samsung Vibrant drivers work for the Sidekick 4G) here.
3. Prepare ADB shell (you’re on your own with this one)
4. Download rageagainstthecage-arm5 and Superuser packages from here (Unzip the files in the same directory as ADB.exe so they will be recognized when you run the following commands)
5. Reboot the phone, and connect it to your computer. (To make sure you have ADB working correctly, check it by going into the command prompt, navigate to where ADB and the files are and run. ‘adb devices’. If nothing shows up under ‘attached devices’, something isn’t right. If you see an attached device, carry on.)
6. Push the rage file : adb push rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin /data/local/tmp
7. adb shell
8. cd /data/local/tmp
9. chmod 755 rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin
10. ./rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin
11. Wait until you get booted back out to your DOS command prompt
12. adb kill-server
13. adb start-server
14. adb shell
15. You should now see a “#” in the command prompt. If you’re still seeing the “$”, then reboot and try again.
16. mount -o remount,rw /dev/block/stl9 /system
17. exit
18. adb push su /system/xbin
19. adb shell chmod 4755 /system/xbin/su
20. adb push Superuser.apk /system/app
21. echo “root::0:0:root:/data/local:/system/bin/sh” > /etc/passwd
22. echo “root::0:” > /etc/group
23. adb shell mount -o remount,ro /dev/block/stl9 /system
24. exit
Now reboot the phone, and try to open an application that requires root. Try Root Explorer or ShootMe.
*Steps 21 and 22 were added by someone else in the forum. These commands make the Superuser application give root access to applications. You can try to run the commands without these two steps, but if you’re not getting root access for applications, it may be best to run them.
There you go! Your Sidekick 4G should be rooted! If you’re still skeptical about this method, you may want to wait it out, as there may be an easier way to get your root on soon.
Now that the G2x and Sidekick 4G have been successfully rooted, all that’s left is the G-Slate.
[Via: XDA-Developers]