How to Root a Nexus 5

Today I will be giving an overview of how to root the nexus 5. Before getting started its important to understand that rooting a phone has its own set of disadvantages. One being that rooting will void any warranty that your device may have. Beyond that rooting will completely wipe your device so you might consider backing your phone up before if you aren’t okay with losing everything on it. Lastly it’s important to understand that attempting to root a phone can end up with a bricked phone. This is always the chance you take when dealing with reinstalling operating systems. If you phone somehow gets turned off or loses power during the rooting process you may never recover it. Now that I got that disclaimer out of the way lets jump into this process.

All you need to root a device is the device itself, a computer and a couple types of free software that I will link to below. OK let’s get started.

First Enable the hidden developers menu on the phone. You do this by going to “settings” then “about phone” listed in this menu is “build number”. You want to rapidly tap “build number” until it unlocks the hidden developers menu. 

Now that you have access to the developers menu open it and check the “USB debugging” check box.

Next you want to switch to a PC and download CF-Auto-Root which you can get here https://download.chainfire.eu/363/CF-Root/CF-Auto-Root/CF-Auto-Root-hammerhead-hammerhead-nexus5.zip

 

Once downloaded you need to extract the entire folder, I use 7-Zip but WinZip and WinRar will also work perfectly fine.

Next you’re going to download and install Android Studio from here https://developer.android.com/studio/install.html

Once you have CF-Auto-Root and Android Studio downloaded and installed it’s time to switch back to your phone. You’re going to want to turn off the phone and boot into bootloader mode. You do this by holding down the physical volume down and power buttons at the same time.

 Once you’re in the bootloader menu notice that next to lock state it says locked. We need to change that so connect your phone to your pc via usb. Wait a second for your computer to install the phones drivers and then launch the command prompt. In the command prompt navigate to where you installed the SDK tools. Once in the correct directory type

Type “fastboot oem unlock”

Follow the prompt on your phone to unlock the boot loader. You should now see that next to lock state it says unlocked.

Now that the boot loader is unlocked its finally time to root your phone.

Navigate to where you installed CF-Auto-Root. Hold shift and right click to open the command line from inside of the file. Now type the command

Root-windows.bat 

This will restart your phone

Your phone should now be rooted you will be able to tell if when its booting you see a red android with an eye-patch instead of the classic green android.