[ROOT] How to flash recovery within Android with terminal / adb shell - Huawei P10 Guides, News, & Discussion

Hi,
this is a small tutorial to show you how to flash the recovery, also eRecovery, via command line / adb shell within Android.
Flashify and other apps never worked for me, so I used commands to flash it without the need of fastboot.
It's a small tutorial for those who never worked with commands like this.
Please notify me if something went wrong or if you found any other issues.
I wanted to make a small script but I stopped it because of the lack of available commands in Android.
DISCLAIMER:
Read this tutorial first.
Never flash custom recovery to eRecovery.
Never flash recoveries from different devices.
Don't try to flash other partitions with this commands if you don't want to risk a brick.
Requirements:
- Oreo / EMUI 8 installed, Nougat hast other partition names. Pie isn't supported by me until final release.
- working root access
- terminal emulator app (I recommend Termius, it's easy to use and has nice features, it's free to use)
> or a PC, and USB cable and working ADB, also USB Debugging enabled in developer settings
- recovery img files on your phone, I recommend it to put them into your user root /data/media/0/ (internal memory)
NOTE: All commands are case sensitive!
Now open your terminal app or open the adb shell.
Type following command to enable root access:
Code:
su
SuperSU will ask you for root access, grant it.
Following command is needed to figure out, which type of memory your phone has:
Code:
ls /dev/block/platform
There are two possible outputs:
If you've a device with the faster UFS memory, it's ff3b0000.ufs, if eMMC it's hi_mci.0.
From now I'll write MEMORY instead of ff3b0000.ufs or hi_mci.0.
For flashing the recovery fire up following command:
Code:
dd if=/PATH/TO/YOUR/RECOVERY.IMG of=/dev/block/platform/MEMORY/by-name/recovery_ramdisk_a
Example: dd if=/data/media/0/twrp_3.2.1.img of=/dev/block/platform/ff3b0000.ufs/by-name/recovery_ramdisk_a
The output should look like this:
Code:
65536+0 records in
65536+0 records out
33554432 bytes transferred in 0.247 secs (135847902 bytes/sec)
If not, check your command and file paths.
For flashin the eRecovery fire up following command:
Code:
dd if=/PATH/TO/YOUR/ERECOVERY.IMG of=/dev/block/platform/MEMORY/by-name/erecovery_ramdisk_a
Example: dd if=/data/media/0/ERECOVERY_RAMDI.IMG of=/dev/block/platform/ff3b0000.ufs/by-name/erecovery_ramdisk_a
IMPORTANT NOTE: DO NOT INSTALL TWRP IN THIS! Flash only stock eRecovery!
The dd command won't give you any progress output, so be a bit patient. It should be done in a few second, but don't close the terminal app or connection before you got any output.
Unix systems like Android will give an output if something went wrong, always.
I use this to flash new TWRP versions or to flash stock recovery before I update.
If you recently updated your phone, you still need to flash via fastboot, because you lost root during the update.
The dd commands also work with fastboot. Mostly you'll use "fastboot flash recovery_ramdisk", but if you need to flash eRecovery, you can use the dd command.
23. February 2019:
Pie should also work, but you have to remove the "_a" after the partition name.
Example:
dd if=/data/media/0/twrp_3.2.1.img of=/dev/block/platform/ff3b0000.ufs/by-name/recovery_ramdisk
Please report if it's working or not.

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How to know the path to the recovery_ramdisk?? Is all devices the same?? I didn't get it right the 1st time .. it shows path is invalid
Sent from my VTR-L29 using Tapatalk

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fr3ker said:
How to know the path to the recovery_ramdisk?? Is all devices the same?? I didn't get it right the 1st time .. it shows path is invalid
Sent from my VTR-L29 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Should be the same on every device. Remember, case sensitive and use _ and not -.
Maybe it's different on non UFS devices, which one do you have?
Are you able to post a screenshot of your command and output?

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Jannomag said:
Should be the same on every device. Remember, case sensitive and use _ and not -.
Maybe it's different on non UFS devices, which one do you have?
Are you able to post a screenshot of your command and output?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Maybe @fr3ker is not on Oreo? The recovery_ramdisk partition is only for Oreo. In Nougat it is just called recovery. I don't know how the Pie partitions are called.

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M1chiel said:
Maybe @fr3ker is not on Oreo? The recovery_ramdisk partition is only for Oreo. In Nougat it is just called recovery. I don't know how the Pie partitions are called.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Also my thought, I wanted to add this to the requirements when I created this post but apparently I forgot this. Now it's added as first point.

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Hi.
I have a hard bricked p10. When I connect to laptop it's says USB SER. It doesn't not turn on I can't access recovery with power + vol. I can't get into fastboot. Anyway I can access fastboot to flash kernel and erecovery?

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Jannomag said:
I use this to flash new TWRP versions or to flash stock recovery before I update.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is it mandatory to flash stock recovery before update? Is it applies only to ota update or ff method?

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Yes, FF or OTA are using stock recovery to flash the update. With TWRP it won't work.

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Updated?
@ Jannomag:
Have you checked this for Pie meanwhile?
I currently have the problem, not being able to enter fastboot with:
Code:
sudo adb reboot bootloader
Additionally, there's something I do not understand. For the dd-command for flashing, why is the input-file (if=) the file in "/dev/block/platform/..." and the output on the sd-card? Wouldn't mean flashing an img to the device, that if= on the sd (or connected PC) and of= the path to the device (phone)?

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Blümchen Blau said:
@ Jannomag:
Have you checked this for Pie meanwhile?
I currently have the problem, not being able to enter fastboot with:
Code:
sudo adb reboot bootloader
Additionally, there's something I do not understand. For the dd-command for flashing, why is the input-file (if=) the file in "/dev/block/platform/..." and the output on the sd-card? Wouldn't mean flashing an img to the device, that if= on the sd (or connected PC) and of= the path to the device (phone)?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
WTF....Why didn't I notice this terrible mistake! Thank you for reading my post completely, you're 100% correct, I'll correct this directly after I submit this post.
Huawei did also a small change at naming the recovery partition, which I'll update, too.
I had also the problem that I wasn't able to boot into fastboot by command before I fried my phone - I couldn't figure out the reason for this.
Again, thank you!

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Jannomag said:
Again, thank you!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your'e welcome! I did update now, but didn't need your (correct ) way to fastboot, because the method described by borgerapper did the trick for me to get into fastboot and flash the needed original recovery.
Thanks anyway!