How to root an Android phone?

Rooting your phone may void the manufacturer's warranty and could cause security risks. Please take this into consideration before performing this process.

Rooting a Samsung device can trip the Knox Warranty void flag which will make the data stored in Knox permanently inaccessible.

There are countless ways in which you can use root access on your Android smartphone, but in this article, we will focus on those used in conjunction with MOBILedit Forensic. 

Our software uses root access to obtain as much data as possible (including deleted data). 

It's also crucial to have a rooted phone in order to perform application analysis and physical dump of any Android phone using MOBILedit Forensic or any other software.

Rooting a phone yourself - a few tips

Most Android devices should be able to be rooted. However, the process of rooting is specific to each phone model, version of Android, and build number. You will always need to find the right tool according to your phone model. 

You can root a majority of older Android phones using an app called KingoRoot, if for some reason this method doesn't work for you (locked bootloader, Knox, etc.) or you have a modern Android device then you may be able to find help on XDA Developers, which is a website with a large active user community dedicated entirely to Android smartphones.

You can also see other techniques we offer for getting more information from the device here.

Please note that sometimes it is necessary to unlock your phone's bootloader in order to root it. You can either find a step-by-step tutorial on how to unlock the bootloader on your phone manufacturer's webpage or you can use a technique described in our user guide here.

Almost all devices tend to wipe all the data once the bootloader is unlocked.

Once rooting has been completed successfully, the phone is then switched to the so-called "rooted mode". In this mode, you will be able to extract and analyze the deleted data, create physical images, access more data from applications, and have more available data for extraction in general.