Root Broken Recovery Image

[Jake The Snake]

Good day,

My rooted/unlocked HTC One M9 (s-on) has a corrupt recovery image, getting the following error "Failed to boot to recovery mode". I tried re-installing both TWRP and Clockwork using 'fastboot flash recovery' and more forceful 'dd' approach without luck. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Hadron]

So what happened when you tried to fastboot flash recovery? If you are in fastboot mode, bootloader unlocked and have a good download of the TWRP image (I didn't know anyone still used CWM) then that should simply overwrite a corrupted recovery. So if that's not working it would be helpful to know what if any error messages you got.

It sounds like the phone attempts to boot into recovery, so I doubt that trying "adb reboot recovery" would produce a different outcome.

There used to be an option to boot into a recovery image without flashing it to the phone: fastboot boot <recovery.img>. That stopped working a few years ago (on the M7 it worked until one or two updates, then stopped). I've found that somebody found a somewhat obscure method to make this work again on a Nexus 4, but no report of how or whether this or something like it works with a HTC. It's a shame, because if this would work it would let you get into recovery even if for some reason you can't flash it (the worst case being that the recovery partition itself is damaged).

The one other thing I can think of would be to try formatting the partition before flashing the recovery:

fastboot format recovery
fastboot flash recovery recovery.img

 

[Jake The Snake]

Thanks Hadron... I tried to format the recovery partition but get an error (below). Flashing recovery partition succeeds however it won't start in recovery mode.

# fastboot erase recovery
erasing 'recovery'...
OKAY [ 0.033s]
finished. total time: 0.033s

# fastboot format recovery
formatting 'recovery' partition...
Formatting is not supported for filesystem with type 'raw'.
FAILED ()
finished. total time: 0.001s

# fastboot flash recovery twrp-3.0.2-0-hima.img
target reported max download size of 800000000 bytes
sending 'recovery' (19912 KB)...
OKAY [ 2.393s]
writing 'recovery'...
(bootloader) HOSD CL#579410
(bootloader) start@1
(bootloader) recovery@100%
(bootloader) Update partition OK
(bootloader) end@Done
OKAY [ 2.361s]
finished. total time: 4.755s

Log:
[4180] [MENU MSG] Booting to recovery mode ...
[4180] partition_enable_wp: group 0
[4190] partition_enable_wp: group_start=mfg group_end=reserve_2, addr_start=98304 size=150994944 bytes
[4310] partition_enable_wp: group_start=hosd group_end=hosd, addr_start=688128 size=67108864 bytes
[4380] Unable to locate /bootselect partition
[4390] use_signed_kernel=0, is_unlocked=0, is_tampered=0.
[4390] Loading boot image (20389888): start