[At Your Own Risk] How to Root your INTERNATIONAL Samsung Galaxy S III, and how to return it to stock if necessary! [Updated 08/06/2012 with new, easier Root method!]

This is the AndroidNZ guide to rooting the latest and greatest Samsung device; the Galaxy S3 [NOTE: this guide is for the INTERNATIONAL VERSION ONLY, you may brick your phone if you try and follow this on your American version].

Thankfully Samsung have not gotten into the habit of locking their bootloaders, so this should be a fairly straightforward and low risk proposition.

Firstly I'd like to thank Chainfire for doing all the hard work here. He not only developed a root method and customised CWM to work with the S3, but he also wrote a pretty easy to follow guide that you can find here at XDA Forums.

As usual everything detailed here is at your own risk, we can't be held responsible for anything you do to your device. You need to be aware that there is a real risk of bricking your device, especially if you do not follow instructions exactly.

You will possibly void the warranty on your device by increasing the flash counter, thankfully Chainfire is planning to update his TriangleAway app within the next few days to remedy this and we will likely be posting a guide on restoring your Samsung Galaxy S3 to stock. [UPDATE: Chainfire has now released an undated version of Triangle Away on the Play Store, so resetting your flash counter is now utterly simples - grab it from here].

Hit us up after the break for our detailed guide with lots of screen grabs to help you along the way (and look out for our video guide on the blogs YouTube channel tomorrow if you feel like you need even more hand-holding).

[If you don't presently own an S III, but have somehow found yourself here you might like to check out the first part of our AndroidNZ S III review here instead of clicking through to the guide]

Updated guide:

As if this wasn't easy enough already, Chainfire released a new single-flash method to Root your Galaxy S III, here's our updated guide for the new, friendlier method:

Preparation

Here is a list of things you will need:

• A fully charged Galaxy S3
• A micro USB connection cable
• A Windows PC 
• An internet connection (for downloading the files needed)

The PC will need to have the USB drivers for the Galaxy S3 installed:
If you simply connect the Galaxy S3 to the PC with the micro USB cable it will install them.
To be very sure your device will be recognised by Odin connect twice - once with USB debugging enabled, and once without - different drivers are installed depending on the status of debugging.

You can enable USB Debugging by going to Settings --> Developer Options and select USB debugging as shown in the screenshot below (blank box means it is not enabled)

If you're still not having any luck then try downloading the latest version of Samsung's Kies software by going here and following the steps below.

1. Click Software so that the Kies download becomes visible 
2. Click the icon highlighted below to download Kies. 

You may then install Kies afterwards and connect your phone, but remember to close Kies after the drivers have completed installing as it may interfere with the rooting process further on.

1. Go here and here  and download the attached files.
2. Using your favourite zip program extract the file inside the CF-Root-SGS3-v6.0.zip

3. You should be left with a .tar file as shown below

4. Now to extract Odin3 follow the same process and you should see the executable file as shown below

5. Disconnect your phone from the PC by removing the USB cable you plugged in earlier. Make sure Kies is also closed before continuing
6. Run the Odin3 exe file and you should see a screen as follows

7. Click the button labelled PDA and then browse to where you extracted the CF-Root.tar file. Click Open

8. Now comes the tricky part, getting your phone into Download mode. Turn your phone off and wait until you are sure it is completely off, it should vibrate to signal this. Now hold down the Volume Down + Home + Power Buttons. You will likely see a screen that says Warning!! press volume up to continue. 
9. The two screens should look similar to the ones below that are for the Galaxy S2:


10. Now plug the USB cable back in . If the drivers haven't been installed, wait until they automatically install. Once installed Odin should display messages similar to those in the image below. Make sure Repartition is not checked as per the screenshot

11. Click Start button

12. Now wait and your phone will be flashed with CF-Root and will automatically reboot. If Odin was successful you should see this:

13. Congratulations you are now Rooted, and also have CWM Recovery and the CWM Recovery application installed - you're done!

Now that your Galaxy S3 is rooted you are free to use Root apps such as Mobile Odin, Titanium Backup, Adfree, and Sixaxis Controller. Make sure to perform the usual backups, including your EFS folder (if that sounds like a foreign language here is our guide to backing up your Rooted Android phone).



Returning your Galaxy S III to stock

This is very straightforward really, first you'll need to reset your flash counter.

Download Chainfire's app Triangle Away from the Play Store and simply run the program. From within the app select the option to reset the flash counter, clicking that and acknowledging a few other things (like for instance that you are actually running the app from an S III) will take you to this screen:

Following the onscreen instructions and pressing volume up resets your flash counter, and you can verify this by booting into download mode. If you do that you'll be greeted with the following screen:

Once you've done that, head to this thread at XDA and download the stock firmware that corresponds to your S IIIs point of origin, extract it to a .tar file like we did above for Chainfire's CWM recovery install, and then flash the .tar file as PDA in Odin, just as we did before. Viola! Your S III now looks completely minty fresh and unadulterated for the service centre people if you needed to return it for warranty-related issues.

What follows is the deprecated guide, use the above guide if you have not yet Rooted your S III. If you've already Rooted with this older guide you have nothing to fear, apart from being easier to apply there is no particular advantage to the new method and you don't need to re-apply Root with it or anything like that - relax, you're already done!

Video Guide:

Preparation

Here is a list of things you will need:

• A fully charged Galaxy S3
• A micro USB connection cable
• A Windows PC 
• An internet connection (for downloading the files needed)

The PC will need to have the USB drivers for the Galaxy S3 installed:
If you simply connect the Galaxy S3 to the PC with the micro USB cable it will install them.
To be very sure your device will be recognised by Odin connect twice - once with USB debugging enabled, and once without - different drivers are installed depending on the status of debugging.

You can enable USB Debugging by going to Settings --> Developer Options and select USB debugging as shown in the screenshot below (blank box means it is not enabled)

If you're still not having any luck then try downloading the latest version of Samsung's Kies software by going here and following the steps below.

1. Click Software so that the Kies download becomes visible 
2. Click the icon highlighted below to download Kies. 

You may then install Kies afterwards and connect your phone, but remember to close Kies after the drivers have completed installing as it may interfere with the rooting process further on.

Installing ClockWorkMod Recovery

1. Go here and scroll down to Attached Files.
2. Click to download the latest version of the CWM Zip with naming format CF-SGS3-CWM-vX.X-vY.Y (As of writing this was CF-SGS3-CWM-v5.5-v1.2.zip)
3. Click to download Odin3 V1.85
4. Using your favourite zip program extract the file inside the CF-SGS3-CWM-vX.X-vY.Y Zip

5. You should be left with a .tar file as shown below

6. Now to extract Odin3 follow the same process and you should see the executable file as shown below

7. Disconnect your phone from the PC by removing the USB cable you plugged in earlier. Make sure Kies is also closed before continuing
8. Run the Odin3 exe file and you should see a screen as follows

9. Click the button labelled PDA and then browse to where you extracted the CWM .tar file. Click Open

10. Now comes the tricky part, getting your phone into Download mode. Turn your phone off and wait until you are sure it is completely off, it should vibrate to signal this. Now hold down the Volume Down + Home + Power Buttons. You will likely see a screen that says Warning!! press volume up to continue. 
11. The two screens should look similar to the ones below that are for the Galaxy S2:


12. Now plug the USB cable back in . If the drivers haven't been installed, wait until they automatically install. Once installed Odin should display messages similar to those in the image below. Make sure Repartition is not checked as per the screenshot

13. Click Start button

14. Now wait and your phone will be flashed with CWM and will automatically reboot. If Odin was successful you should see this:

15. Congratulations you have now installed ClockWorkMod Recovery on your Samsung Galaxy S3. Now read on to find out how to gain root access on your device.

Rooting

Now to gain root access to your device

1. Go to the SuperSU thread on XDA and scroll down to Attached Files
2. Click the link  to download CWM SuperSU 
3. Copy the file to the internal SD card of your Samsung Galaxy S3 
4. Now you get to learn how to reboot into Recovery mode on your device. First turn the device off and wait for it to vibrate
5. Now hold Volume Up+ Home + Power, release the power button after about one second or when the Samsung Galaxy SIII logo appears on the screen. 
6. Now you are in ClockWorkMod Recovery, you can navigate up and down using the volume buttons and use power/home button to select, press back to go back. 
7. Scroll down to install zip from sdcard and press home
8. If choose zip from scard is highlighted press home, otherwise scroll until it is highlighted
9. Scroll down to the folder where you placed the SuperSU zip file earlier and press home
10. Now scroll to the CWM-SuperSU-v0.zip and press home
11. Scroll down to Yes - Install CWM-SuperSU-v0.zip and press home
12. At this point some messages will appear on the screen and you should see one saying Install from sdcard complete
13. Now scroll to *******Go Back******* press Home and repeat until reboot system now is highlighted
14. Press home on reboot system now to reboot your device
15. Now to confirm that you indeed have root access once your device has rebooted successfully
16. Go to your app drawer and find the SuperSU icon as shown below
17. Once loaded select Settings and you should see that Enable Superuser is ticked

Now that your Galaxy S3 is rooted you are free to use Root apps such as Mobile Odin, Titanium Backup, Adfree, and Sixaxis Controller. Make sure to perform the usual backups, including your EFS folder (if that sounds like a foreign language here is our guide to backing up your Rooted Android phone).