Rooted Verizon Droid X 2.3.340

I broke my droid, and was sent a replacement from Verizon. It was a refurbished Droid X with 2.3.340 on it.

I had originally used used z4root 1.3.0, and had it on my computer still... I installed z4root onto the new phone, ran it, and the phone froze. Had to pop the battery to reboot the phone.

So I googled my way to something called DoRootForWindows:
How to: Root DROID X Running Official Android 2.2 - Droid Life: A Droid Community Blog

It took about 15 minutes to follow the article above to the point of running doroot.bat.

doroot.bat crapped out somewhere in the middle. But it did copy some files before it crapped out. Phone not rooted at this point.

I then ran z4mod 1.3.0 again because I was frustrated. This time, it ran flawlessly.

So, procedure:
- install z4root.1.3.0.apk onto your phone
- follow the article above to setup your computer & run doroot.bat
- run z4mod on your phone - root should work fine

From what I am seeing (I admit I only spent a few minutes researching), the doroot.bat copies over rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin, busybox, su, and a droid package called superuser.apk.

BusyBox - this is one program that replicates the core functionality of over 100 seperate unix programs - this makes busybox very popular on tiny embedded linux computers (the droid appears to be a tiny linux computer). I bet z4root needs this to do some sort of shell work (copy or move or download files, etc....)

SU - a common unix program to change your login from {user} to {superuser} - i.e. to become root. SU is short for SuperUser.

SUPERUSER.APK - looks like a program written for the Droid - this program provides access to SU, and has an interface that allows the phone user to control access to SU. Sweet - if it works as advertised (I ain't gonna take the time to find out either).

rageagainstthecage-arm5.bin - this is the magic virus that exploits the Android Debug Bridge (adb) on the phone, somehow (don't ask me) which allows the virus to exploit the linux kernel on the phone to get root.

One or more of these seemed to be needed by z4root 1.3.0.