I gave you today the way to unlock your Xiaomi mobile, so to be able to install TWRP and any custom ROM that you may want. Now is time to see first what is TWRP and why I propose to you to install it and secondly, how can you install TWRP.
TWRP is an open source, community project. TWRP development is done by roughly 4 people at this point. There is a large support from the community with many people who are willing to answer questions and help people with their devices either through the IRC channel or on forums like xda-developers, xiaomi-miui.gr and many more. Team Win was originally formed to work on porting WiMAX to CM7 for the HTC EVO 4G. After that, the team wanted to work on a project that would work on more devices than just the EVO 4G and settled on working on a recovery. Today TWRP is the leading custom recovery for Android phones. A custom recovery is used for installing custom software on your device. This custom software can include smaller modifications like rooting your device or even replacing the firmware of the device with a completely custom “ROM” like OmniROM.
There are 3 ways to install TWRP in your mobile. One way is to install it for the first time and two ways to install a different/updated version of TWRP.
Install TWRP for the first time
First of all, I want to believe that you haven’t delete the adb folder that we made with the first, because we are going to need these files. If you haven;t deleted them, you can proceed.
So we find the folder and we check that everything is inside. Now we must download the TWRP file for our mobile. You can find a list of TWRP at the Greek Xiaomi-miui.gr Forum at this page.
- Download the TWRP file that is for your mobile to your PC
- You must extract the recovery file that can be found inside the zip files. The wanted file will be something like recovery.img
- Move the file in the same folder where the adb files are.
- Open a CMD window as admin (Run as administrator with win+x)
- We close our mobile and then put it in Fastboot mode by pressing only the power button and the volume down, until we see Mitu.
- In the DOS windows write cd c:\adb to take us to the folder where the files that we need are.
- Now we write fastboot flash recovery recovery.img , press enter and we wait to see that everything is ok.
- After everything is installed, we write fastboot reboot and while we hold the Volume+ we press enter.
- The moment that we see the Mi Logo, we release the Volume+ and TWRP will load. If your mobile has also Miui Recovery, you must tick on the option about Support MIUI-OTA.
You have now permanently installed TWRP. Versions of the TWRP for the Xiaomi mobiles you can find at this page from the Greek Xiaomi-Miui forum.
In case you want to install a new version of the TWRP, all you have to do are the following. Download the desired zip file to your mobile. Install the file as if it was a custom rom. After you have installed the file go to the main menu and reboot in recovery. You will enter now in the new TWRP environment.