how to flash a custom recovery on Android device

If you got tired with the plain and boring stock firmware and decided to upgrade you device with a powerful and customizable custom ROMs like CyanogenMod, you need to perform one step first – install a custom recovery (flash a custom recovery on Android device). A custom recovery lets you perform several advance operations on your Android device. Every Android device comes with a stock recovery which may slightly vary between manufacturers but their features are identical and limited. They only allow you to manually flash official updates and clear up you device’s data and cache. However, custom recovery are a lot bigger deal which adds all sort of functionality to your device. Flashing a custom recovery is often a key part of rooting process but its functionality is not limited there. You can create a backup image which backups all your phone settings, applications, and app data. These backups are crucial of you experiment on you device fails. In such cases, you can restore the backup and your device becomes fully functional like before. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to flash a custom recovery to your Android device. Note that your device have an unlocked bootloader before you start this tutorial.

Before we begin our tutorial, here are the pre-requisites for flashing a custom recovery on Android device:

• USB drivers for you device. You can grab them from your device’s company’s official website.
• Android SDK must be installed. You can download it from https://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html?hl=sk
• Latest version of CWM or TWRP recoveries.
  CWM: https://www.clockworkmod.com/rommanager
  TWRP: http://teamw.in/project/twrp2
• Device connected to the computer.

Steps for Flashing Custom Recovery:

1) Before you start, you must first enable USB Debugging from “Developer Options > and check USB Debugging”. You can read detail steps for how to enable USB debugging in Android.

2) Now we open Command Prompt and paste necessary codes. Once you’ve opened the command prompt, you need to change the folder to “Platform Tools” in Android SDK. Usually it looks like C:/Android SDK/adt-bundle-windows-x86_64-20131030/sdk/platform-tools/ but it depends upon where you’ve extracted the SDK. To change the path simply type “cd” followed by the path of the SDK.

3) In the Command Prompt enter the following.

Adb devices (make sure your device is listed)

Adb reboot bootloadee (wait for the device to reboot in bootloader mode)

4) Now go to “platform-tools” directory and open command prompt there (shift>right click>open command window here).
In command line enter:
Fastboot devices (make sure your device is listed)
Type “fastboot flash recovery file.img” (replace “file.img” with the recovery you want to flash)
5) Reboot you device and enter recovery mode by pressing necessary key combination (power button or volume down button in most devices).

This is it. This is how you flash a custom recovery in an android.