It’s lucky to own a flagship device due to multiple reasons. For one, you’re the center of attention (and jealousy) of your friends. For another, you get the top of the line hardware that will last you for years to come. Finally, you get a massive developer community that’s all about making the device as much more useable and useful as possible.
In the world of Android, almost all sorts of modding begins with two essential steps: getting root access on the device, and installing a custom recovery like ClockworkMod. Stock recoveries are always not only feature-limited, but also subject to a lot of restrictions and manufacturer whims for a power user’s usage. For this reason, you will want to get a custom recovery on your device, too, so that you can take things up from there.
HTC One is the Taiwanese manufacturer’s latest flagship, and a monster of a device. While I personally love Sense 5 and would hate to give it up for anything, there will always be reasons for people to root and install custom recoveries. The good part is that CWM officially supports HTC One, and the official ClockworkMod Recovery for HTC One is available over the web as well as through ROM Manager. In this post, we’ll guide you how to install CWM Recovery (or any other custom recovery of your choice) on HTC One.
Before beginning, please understand that you follow these instructions at your own risk. We cannot be held responsible for any damage to your device as a result of following this procedure.
Requirements:
- Rooted HTC One with unlocked bootloader. Follow our guide here on how to root HTC One, and here on how to unlock HTC One Bootloader.
- HTC USB driver for One configured on your machine
- Configure Android ADB and fastboot on Windows.
- ClockworkMod Recovery image for HTC One from clockworkmod.com/rommanager
- At least 50% battery remaining on your device
It’s generally advisable to make a backup of all your data to avoid any inconvenience afterwards. Moreover, since you’re rooted, a Nandroid backup would be even more helpful. Alternatively, you can follow our guide on: How to completely backup your Android device on PC without root access.
Procedure:
Before going into step-by-step details of how to flash CWM on your HTC One, I must point out that the easiest way would be to download ROM Manager from Play Store and use that to flash CWM. The process would require root access, but the guide already assumes that you’re pre-rooted. However, if you still want to feel like a geek doing things through Command Line, here’s what you need to do:
Step 1: Download ClockworkMod recovery image for HTC One from the Requirements section above. It should be in .img file format.
Step 2: Reboot your HTC One in bootloader mode, and connect it to the PC using the USB cable. To boot your phone in bootloader mode, press the Volume Down and Power buttons at the same time until the screen turns on. Now select “FASTBOOT” option by navigating through menu using Power button on the device
Step 3: Ensure that the phone has been detected and accepted by the computer, and that you have Fastboot installed.
Step 4: In the folder where your fastboot.exe and ADB files are residing, launch a command prompt window. You can do that by holding shift and right-click anywhere within that location, and selecting “open command prompt here”. The recovery .img file should also be in the same location now.
Step 5: Enter the following command:
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
where recovery.img will be replaced with the actual name of your img file.
Step 6: Reboot the device normally.
Congratulations, you now have ClockworkMod recovery installed on your HTC One. Happy modding!
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the web.