Last Updated on March 28, 2017 by Mathew Diekhake

There are two types of recovery images available for your Samsung devices. The first and most common is called the stock recovery and it comes with your device when you open it out of the box. The stock recovery acts as a separate bootable partition for your OS that you can enter to take a factory reset, wipe the cache partition, wipe data and apply some OTA updates.

A custom recovery was the other options people have to install. Usually it’s the geeks who are into customizing a device that want to install a custom recovery because it gives them more options — and some of those options are vitally important to being able to customize a device.

Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge

It doesn’t matter if you have a stock recovery or a custom recovery running on your Samsung device, the following guide will work just the same. Anyone with a custom recovery will boot that recovery using the guides below. Likewise, anyone with a stock recovery will boot the stock version using the guide below. It automatically boots whatever recovery is already on your device.

These are the guidelines to enter recovery mode on Samsung devices.

Entering the Recovery Mode on Samsung devices

Using the hardware keys:

  1. Turn off the Samsung smartphone or tablet by pressing the Power button and choosing the option to switch off from the Device Options menu. Anyone with an unresponsive display can turn it off by long-pressing the Power button for a maximum of 10 seconds.
  2. Boot the Samsung device by holding the Volume Up + Home + Power keys at the same time.
  3. You now have the device in the recovery mode and can make your selections from the menu on the display.
  4. Scroll through the list of options using the Volume Down or Volume Up keys and confirm your selection by pressing the Power button.

Using adb:

  1. You must have adb set up on your computer: ADB for Windows, ADB for Mac or ADB for Linux.
  2. From within the adb folder, hold the Shift key and right-click where it is showing the white background.
  3. Choose to open a new command prompt window here from the menu.
  4. Type the command: adb reboot recovery
  5. Your Samsung device will now boot into recovery mode; use the Volume keys to navigate on your smartphone or tablet display and confirm your actions with the Power button.

Using applications:

  1. The Quick Boot app is only available for people with root access to the Samsung device. You cannot reboot to recovery using an app for Samsung without root access.
  2. Open the Google Play Store on your Samsung device.
  3. Browse for the Quick Boot application and agree to install the same on your device.
  4. Open the Quick Boot application from your app drawer once you have finished downloading the app.
  5. Choose the Recovery option from the Quick Boot menu and your Samsung device will boot to the recovery.