Last Updated on May 31, 2019 by Mathew Diekhake

The first step towards rooting the Huawei Mate S is installing a custom recovery on the phone. And the custom recovery requires your bootloader to be unlocked. If you have got it done already, the following guide should help you get a custom recovery up and running on your phone in no time.

The recovery that you are going to flash on your phone – TWRP – should help you do many tasks on your phone. For instance, you can use it to flash a custom ROM or flash a custom kernel, and you can even backup your current ROM for restoring at a later time. There is a lot that you can do with a custom recovery on your phone.

Huawei Mate S

So, follow the following steps to install TWRP Recovery on your Huawei Mate S:

Files You Need

  1. The bootloader on your phone must be unlocked before you can install a custom recovery on it. If your bootloader is locked, please head to the tutorial over here and follow it until step-13 to get your bootloader unlocked. When that is done, return here and continue.
  2. This should flash a custom recovery called TWRP on your Huawei Mate S.
  3. You must have a Windows running computer in order to do this tutorial.
  4. You should have Universal ADB drivers installed on your Windows computer.
  5. Download Fastboot to your computer. It will help you execute commands on your phone.
  6. Download TWRP Recovery to your computer. It is the custom recovery that you are going to flash on your phone.

Installing TWRP Recovery on the Huawei Mate S

  1. Unzip files from Fastboot over to your computer by right-clicking on it and selecting Extract here.
  2. Head to Menu->Settings->About phone on your phone and tap on Build number for 7-8 times and it will say you are a developer. That should unlock the developer options menu on your phone.
  3. Head to Menu->Settings->Developer options on your phone and turn on USB debugging. If you do not turn on this option, the following steps will not work.
  4. Plug in your phone to your computer using a suitable USB cable.
  5. Copy TWRP Recovery to the folder where fastboot.exe and adb.exe files are located.
  6. Open a Command Prompt Window in the Fastboot folder. To do that, hold down Shift on your keyboard and right-click anywhere on your screen and select Open command window here.
  7. When the Command Prompt Window launches, type in the following command and press Enter:
    adb devices
  8. Your device should show up in the list.
  9. Now, type in the following command and hit Enter:
    adb reboot bootloader
  10. Your phone should reboot into the bootloader mode.
  11. Once your phone enters the bootloader mode, issue the following command to flash TWRP Recovery on your phone. Make sure to replace twrp.img with the actual recovery image name.
    fastboot flash recovery twrp.img
  12. Wait for it to install TWRP on your phone.
  13. When it’s done installing TWRP, reboot your phone by executing the following command:
    fastboot reboot
  14. Your phone should reboot normally.
  15. And you are done!

You have successfully installed TWRP Recovery on your Huawei Mate S, and you can now follow our how to root the Huawei Mate S tutorial to gain root access on your phone.

Once you get root access on your phone, you will have everything that you would ever need to customize your phone to a greater extent. From installing root-requiring apps to flashing a custom ROM, you should be able to do everything once you are rooted. So, go ahead and get your phone rooted.

Likewise, you can skip all that and just learn how to boot the Huawei Mate S in the custom recovery mode so you can take NANdroid backups and install custom ROMs on your smartphone.

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