How to Root the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (Manual Method)

Before we get started, I'm going to tell you straight that there is a simpler method out there to root your phone. It's called Superboot, and a quick Google search will reveal it. All Superboot does, is automatically installs the su and busybox binaries, along with the Superuser apk to their relevant directories with the appropriate permissions. We're NOT going to tell you how to do it that way.

FreeYourAndroid is about learning, after all. So... let's get started.

DOWNLOAD : Galaxy Nexus FYA Root Package and extract it to c:\gnexroot (for the purposes of this guide)

WARNING : UNLOCKING THE BOOTLOADER WILL WIPE YOUR DATA

Method

1. First, navigate to C:\gnexroot and install the Samsung drivers (Samsung_USB_Driver_for_Moblie_Phones_v1_4_6_0.exe)

2. With the phone turned OFF, hold VOLUME UP + VOLUME DOWN and power the phone on. This will put you in bootloader mode.

3. Navigate again to C:\gnexroot, and hold SHIFT on your keyboard, and right click in the white space. Then, click 'Open command window here'

4. In the command prompt, type:

fastboot oem unlock

You will be prompted to confirm that you wish to unlock the bootloader. You do, of course.

5. Once the bootloader has been unlocked, it's time to boot up the device using the insecure boot.img (ro.secure=0 set in the ramdisk). This essentially means you have permanent root for the duration of this boot session. In order to boot up using that boot image, simply type:

fastboot boot boot.gsm.img

^USE THE ABOVE ONLY IF YOU HAVE A GSM VERSION. IF YOU HAVE CDMA, USE THE COMMAND BELOW INSTEAD

fastboot boot boot.cdma.img

Don't expect to see anything wildly different during the boot process - it will boot as normal.

6. Once the phone has booted, in the command prompt window, type the following commands, pressing enter after each line:

adb root

adb remount

adb push su /system/bin

adb push Superuser.apk /system/app

adb shell chmod 06755 /system/bin/su

adb shell chmod 06755 /system/app/Superuser.apk

adb reboot

So that you understand exactly what you have just done, I'll break it down for you. adb root enables root priviliges in adb. This is most likely not a necessary step, but do it anyway. The next command, adb remount will mount the /system partition as read-write, meaning you are able to make changes to it. The next two adb push commands are simply commands to transfer the su binary and Superuser apk file to the phone. They will not work just yet, though. The final step of the above list of commands is to set the permissions correctly using chmod (change mode). Once this has been done, an adb reboot reboots the phone (back to the stock boot.img on the device), and you're all set with full root access!