A phone like the HTC One M8 without a custom recovery is like a pizza without cheese. Being one of the popular Android devices out there, the One M8 has been blessed with multiple custom recoveries and you have the option to choose what recovery you want to install on your device.

The PhilZ custom recovery is a popular recovery that is available for the aforementioned device. It contains all the features of CWM Recovery and getting it up and running on your device takes no more than a few minutes. Here’s how you can do that:

HTC One M8

Files You Need

1. Your bootloader must be unlocked before you can install a custom recovery. Please follow the official instructions for unlocking the bootloader on the HTC One M8 given Unlock HTC Bootloader and you should be good to go.

2. Your device must be rooted. Please search our site to find a root tutorial for your device.

3. This should flash the PhilZ custom recovery that is based on CWM Recovery.

4. You should have HTC Drivers installed on your computer.

5. Download the PhilZ custom recovery to your computer.

6. Download Fastboot to your computer. It’ll be used to install the recovery on your device.

Installing a Custom Recovery on the HTC One M8

1. Extract files from Fastboot to your computer. To do that, right-click on the Fastboot archive and select Extract here and it’ll extract all the files from the archive.

2. Turn on USB debugging on your device. To do that, head to Menu->Settings->Developer options->USB debugging.

3. Plug in your phone to your computer using a USB cable.

4. Open a CMD Window in the folder where fastboot is located. To do so, hold down Shift and right-click anywhere on your screen and select Open command window here.

5. When the CMD window launches, type in the following command and press Enter.

adb reboot bootloader

6. Your phone should reboot into bootloader mode. Once in there, select fastboot using the buttons given on your device.

7. Now, issue the following command to install the recovery on your device. Make sure to replace recoveryname.img with the actual recovery image name.

fastboot flash recovery recoveryname.img

8. Wait for it to install the recovery on your phone.

9. When the recovery has been installed, reboot your device by issuing the following command:

fastboot reboot

10. You’re all done.

Your HTC One M8 now has a custom recovery that should let you flash a number of third-party tools on your device. These things include custom ROMs, custom Kernels, and so on.