Twrp Recovery Flash Command
Mauricette Atencio
An Android device consists of several pieces of software, including the bootloader, radio, recovery and system. The recovery is a runtime environment separated from Android that can perform various system-related tasks. It contains tools to help repair installations as well as official updates. There are two kinds of recovery, one is stock recovery, the other is custom recovery.
The stock recovery on Android device can delete all user and cache content ( for factory reset purposes ), allow external tools to run functions on Andorid device and perform system updates. The stock recovery is a limited system. A custom recovery is a third-party recovery environment. Compared to stock recovery, the custom recovery has more addtional features. It is modified to allow update packages that have not been digitally signed by official sources. Custom recoveries has the ability to create and restore device backups.
Head to TWRP official website and go to the Devices page for searching the version of your device. Go to the "download links" section on that page and download the TWRP image. Copy the TWRP image to the folder in which you have installed the ADB and rename it to twrp.img.
Every phone is a bit different to another when booted into bootloader. But most of modern devices boot into bootloader by turning off the device, then hold the "Power" and "Volume Down" buttons for 10 seconds before releasing. If this method doesn't work well on your device, you had better refer to the Google instructions.
Note:If the TWRP ask if you would like to root your device, choose "DO Not Install". Tt is better to root your device with KingoRoot, the professional one-click root apk for Android device, rather than having TWRP do it for you. Remember, backup before you do anything else in TWRP, lest you mess up your device in the process.
My device (Samsung Galaxy S3 I9300) is not detected by fastboot in Download Mode, but it is detected properly by adb. I want to install TWRP as my device recovery. Is there any way to install it using adb instead of fastboot?
There is a question about the problem of detection of the device by fastboot on this site (which has no working answer yet). But my question is not how to solve that problem. If you like to answer that problem please see this page.
There is no fastboot mode on Samsung. You must use the ODIN mode, which is an alternative to fastboot. On Linux there is a client application called Heimdall which talks to phones via Odin mode. So the answer to your question is ODIN or Heimdall. ODIN is the proprietary Samsung PC application, Heimdall is multiplatform open source alternative.
Alternatively, if you are able to root your phone somehow, you can put TWRP (or any other recovery) on your phone by rewriting the recovery partition via shell but this can be tricky and I wouldn't recommend it unless you know exactly what you are doing or willing to risk bricking your phone. If interested, I can write a generic how-to too but I'd rather leave it to someone with more experience on that - I only did it like 5 times.
After flashing recovery, remove battery, then hold the appropriate button combination to boot into (new) recovery. Then reboot into system from the new recovery. Otherwise, unless we reboot into new recovery once, the boot snoopery may replace new recovery with old.
First of all, Heimdall is a flashing software for putting firmware into the different partitions of Samsung Android phones. It's cross platform, and supposedly equivalent in functionality to that of Odin, although I've never tried Odin. Heimdall is also cross platform so you can follow this guide if you're on mac or windows I think.
Heimdall version
At the time of this post, the newest version was 1.4.2. I had to compile that myself from source though, but it was relatively easy if you just follow the build instructions inside the readme. I had to use 1.4.2 to get it to work with my phone so if you have issues you should try getting the newest one. There were binaries of 1.4.0 on the official website, and 1.4.1 in the ubuntu repo.
Installing Heimdall
At the time, I could also install heimdall from ubuntu repos with apt-get install, however the packages were called heimdall-flash and heimdall-flash-frontend. Idk why, but they're the same. Also they were 1.4.1 so they unfortunately didn't work for me, so I had to install them myself after compiling.
Update March 6, 2019 -- regarding the 1.4.2 source code
Since the time of writing, the project has moved, so the referenced github repo is now rather empty. You could follow his link to the new project, but if you'd like to try with the version that I used here, I made a fork which you can access here to clone and build for 1.4.2. (Both the master and 1.4.2 branch are the same, so you can use either one for the same result, I just made the 1.4.2 branch for emphasis.)
The problem now is that you need to run these as root to connect to your phone, and heimdall-frontend uses heimdall, so you need to add them to your PATH.
However, by running sudo the PATH gets reset, so if you just export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/heimdalldirectory its not gonna find it so what I did (which you shouldn't really do because it should be reserved for system applications but whatever, it works, and you can just delete the heimdall files after you finished to keep a clean system) was to put both files in /bin/
sudo mv ./heimdall /bin/
sudo mv ./heimdall-frontend /bin/
Now you can sudo heimdall-frontend
Other problems with heimdall
If you get libusb errors when trying to export pid or anything else, try a different USB cable, and try different ports on your computer. That actually worked for me.
Flashing of firmware
First of all, your phone needs to be in Download mode, so google how you do that. For me I had to power off the phone, and then hold Power+Vol Up+Home. Or Vol Down I can't remember.
Download and save .pit file
Next you'll want to Download the pit file from your device. This is also a good way to check if heimdall is working correctly, by just trying to print the pit. But you should really download the pit file and store it because you'll need it for flashing. It works as a sort of partition map (Partition Information Table).
Now that you have that, you've done a very good job so pat yourself on the back. You're a really advanced hacker person aren't you? Wow. Good job. Now the real shit begins though so get ready. This is where you might brick your device so beware.
Also, the warranty of your phone will be void after you flash anything onto it like this, so this is a kind of point of no return, although you might be able to flash it back to warranty condition if you have the stock recovery img. Not sure if phones can recognize that or not.
Flash custom recovery first
The first thing you might want to do is install a custom recovery like TWRP. TWRP lets you backup all your partitions, which can be nice in case you flash the wrong thing and want to get back to square one. You can also save your partitions with dd but I'm not gonna get into that here.
Like I said, this might void your warranty, and after doing this, I could not update through the stock phone update mechanism anymore (I mean, as a regular person going into Settings->about->Check for updates on your phone, it said something like "Your phone has been changed, no updates for you".
So to flash TWRP, open up heimdall-frontend again, go to the Flash tab, browse for your .pit file. Then Add a partition file, and select RECOVERY as the name, and find your recovery.img file: See figure 1.
Figure 1 -- heimdall-frontend with RECOVERY flashing
Now, start, and it will reboot when it finishes probably so be ready, and make it reboot straight into recovery right away. If not the custom recovery will be wiped. For me, booting into recovery was the same as to boot into download, just the opposite direction volume.
In my case I wanted to flash the newest stock rom update, because I needed the updated bootloader and modem firmware to install LineageOS 15.1 (Android 8.1), which I could later simply install from within TWRP.
So I downloaded the newest stock rom update from sammobile.
You can get the newest firmware from there for free if you sign up, but have to pay for older ones it seemed.
It might also be important that you get the right ROM for the right region or country, I don't know if that affects the ability for the phone to boot or not, but I'd try to get the right one if I were you.
For me it was a large file of about 1.5 GB. A .zip file to be exact, which upon extraction revealed two files, one of them being a .tar.md5 file.
If I just renamed the .tar.md5 file to a .tar file (removing the .md5 part of the name) I could extract it, and it revealed the files that can be flashed by heimdall.
Which made me very anxious and insecure, and I felt that this was perhaps a bit much, but then I figured it out.
Just like that recovery file from before, all these files correspond to a Partition name in Heimdall Frontend, from the .pit file. So what we'll actually do here with heimdall is just put the contents of these files/images into the partitions of our devices, and then they'll replace whatever was there from before. So it's all quite simple really if you think about it.
The name of the partition isn't always the same as the file, but there is a file name hint below the name so look at that. For example the APNHLOS partition name corresponds to NON-HLOS.bin. See figure 2.
Figure 2: APNHLOS file name hint
Now just keep adding all these until they're all in heimdall (figure 3). This should be a pointer also to whether or not you're using the right firmware. All files should fit into a partition. However, you might want to not flash the RECOVERY to preserve the custom recovery previously installed. You might have to boot directly into recovery again after flashing this time too to avoid reseting to the stock recovery, but I'm not sure. Just in case.
Figure 3: Heimdall Frontend with all firmware files added, except for the recovery image.