Rooting the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini (And Try not to Brick it while you're at it)

So recently, I decided that I wanted to root a Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, because what is Android without root access, right?

My first attempt at rooting the S4 mini ended with me bricking the phone! Not a very good experience I tell you. Luckily, I was able to get it back up and running. But that is a story for another day.

For my second attempt at rooting the S4 mini, I decided to take as much precaution as possible and actually take my time.



Whenever you want to mess around with your phone by doing stuff such as rooting, installing custom ROMs, unlocking the bootloader and all those possible misadventures, the first thing you really want to do is backup all your data. For the S4 mini it was very easy, I backed up my data with Samsung Kies.

Samsung Kies Back up Window

With Samsung Kies you can back up you messages, call log and even your photos and videos. You can also backup the apks of the apps you have installed. So however you want to do it, whether on the cloud or on your PC make sure you backup whatever you don't want to loose incase something goes wrong.

Once I had my data backed up, I did some Googling to find a good tutorial to root mine android. This is the one I found and used -> How to Root Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini.The tutorial is pretty straight forward and if you follow it you will have a very high chance of success.

For the rooting process what you'll need in terms of hardware is: your S4 Mini Phone, A Computer (I used a Windows PC), and a micro usb cable.

For software you'll need to ensure you have the S4 Mini USB drivers installed, you have Odin and the root MD5 file. All this you'll be able to find in the tutorial.

Also another point to note is that not all S4 Mini's are the same. For instance the model number of the one I was rooting was GT-I9195, but there are also GT-I9190 and GT-I9192 among others, so you'll need to know the exact model number when downloading the MD5 file. But no worries, all this is covered in the tutorial that I linked to. I followed it and rooted my phone in less than 5 minutes.

If all goes as planned and nothing breaks, then you will have gotten one step closer to enjoying the full power of the droid. But with great power comes great opportunity to screw things up. But what's life without a little risk. The next thing I now what to attempt is installing a custom ROM. That should be interesting.