I’d been waiting for Froyo (Android OS 2.2) to root my shiny new Samsung EPIC 4G. Turns out I’m impatient so I found the one click root on the interwebs and gave it a shot. It failed every time and I couldn’t figure it out. I tried it on a Windows 7 64bit machine as well as two separate WindowsXP machines… all failed. What I most ran into were “Device Not Found” errors during the scripts execution. Below are the step by step instructions of how I FINALLY rooted my EPIC. Turns out it was pretty simple in the end, the instructions I found on the web just weren’t as specific as I needed. Below are the steps I took to get root.

So it’s stated… I had nothing to do with creating root access to the EPIC. All credit for that goes to joeykrim for the manual root, and noobnl for the .bat file. If you don’t know who they are… hit up XDA-Dev and discover the wild world of rooting, modding, custom ROMS, etc.

1. First you need to make sure you have the latest Android sdk. You can download it at http://developer.android.com/sdk. There’s no installer for the sdk, so feel free to place it wherever you’d like on your system (*DO* note the path because you’ll need it in two steps below). Once installed you’ll want to add the sdk to your Windows path. This is different for WindowsXP/2000 and Windows7. Don’t forget to reboot after you add the sdk’s tool subdirectory to your path!
   • Add to WindowsXP/Windows 2000 path instructions
   • Add to Windows7 path instructions
2. Go over to “One click root for the Epic 4G! v2.2.4 Now has Busybox & remount scripts!” thread and grab the latest zip file. I used v2.2.4 which is the latest at the time of this post.
3. Extract the zip file into the ROOT of the ‘android-sdk-windows’ folder. That’s right… place it directly in the root of the Android sdk folder.
4. Next you’ll want to put your phone in USB debug mode. USB Debug mode can be enabled on your phone by checking the USB debugging option in Menu –> Settings –> Applications –> Development. (again, this is ON the phone itself, not in Windows).
5. Download and install the Samsung USB drivers. There is a different package for 32bit and 64bit versions of Windows. **Note: During installation the CDC Abstract Control Model driver might hang. It did on mine, but don’t worry because you don’t need it. Simply unplug your device and it will report failure.
   • Samsung Drivers – 32Bit Windows
   • Samsung Drivers – 64Bit Windows
6. Next open up command prompt (cmd). On XP/2000 click Start, then Run, then type in ‘cmd’.  On Win7 hit the Orb and type ‘cmd’, then RIGHT CLICK on the cmd.exe and Run As Administrator.
7. In the command prompt, type “cd \<path to sdk>\<one click root>\”. The brackets here indicate that you need to know WHERE you placed these during step 1 and step 3. If you don’t know how to do that… please don’t ask for help. Rooting can brick your phone, if you don’t know simple Windows paths then don’t try to root.
8. Restart your phone. I do this by yanking the battery. Pop off the back case, pull the battery, place it back in, snap the case back on and then hold the power button until the phone fires up.
9. Back in your command window type ‘run.bat’ and hit enter. Let the script go to work; when it’s done you’ll be prompted to reboot your phone… click any key and let the phone reboot (leave it connected via USB and leave your cmd prompt open).
10. Once the phone has rebooted type ‘adb shell’ into your command prompt and you should get a ‘$’ symbol.
11. Now type “su” and you should get a ‘#’ symbol.
12. If you got those symbol’s, then you are now rooted and you can disconnect and enjoy having your phone wide open and ready to do your bidding.