How to Boot the OnePlus 6 into Recovery Mode

Whether you’re on stock recovery or a custom recovery, you will want to follow this tutorial to boot the OnePlus 6 into Recovery Mode.

I recently showed you how to boot the OnePlus 6 into Fastboot Mode and that’s because it’s one of the special boot modes that we should all know about. That boot mode is needed if you want to do things such as unlocking the bootloader or issuing various Fastboot commands from the command prompt but I would say that the OnePlus 6 Recovery Mode is actually going to be more important for most people.

While we can do less with the stock recovery it’s still important to know in case we need to perform a factory reset.

Recovery Mode is also great to know about in case we install a custom recovery on the OnePlus 6. I will be showing you how to do this once I unlock the bootloader of my device so that will come in a future tutorial. For now, I just want to show you how to boot into the OnePlus 6 Recovery Mode which will work the same whether you have a stock recovery or a custom recovery installed. I will also take some time to show you the various things that we can do in both the stock recovery and a custom recovery on this device.

OnePlus 6 Recovery Mode Tutorial

1. Press and hold the Power button to bring up the Power Menu
2. Tap the Power Off option
3. Then tap the Power Off option again
4. And wait for the OnePlus 6 to shut down
5. Then press and hold the following two buttons at the same time
6. Power button and Volume Down button
7. Continue holding these two buttons down until you feel the OnePlus 6 vibrate
8. Once you feel the phone vibrate, you can let go of the Power button
9. But continue holding the Volume Down button until we boot into Recovery Mode

Explanation

There are a number of different ways that we can boot the OnePlus 6 into Recovery Mode. Since I’ll be referring to this tutorial directly from other guides I wanted to lay out the most straightforward way in the step by step guide above. However, I will also talk about the other methods at the end of this section. So to begin, we need to get our OnePlus 6 into a powered off state and we do this by pressing and holding the Power button for a few seconds. This will bring up the Power Menu and it’s here that we want to tap the Power Off option.

The OnePlus 6 will ask you to confirm if you want to shut down the phone so go ahead and tap the Power Off option again and then lets wait for a few seconds until the device is completely off. Once it is shut down, this is where we want to press and hold both the Power and Volume Down buttons at the same. We are to continue holding these two buttons down until you feel the OnePlus 6 vibrate. Once you feel the phone vibrate then you can go ahead and let go of the Power button.

However, you will still need to continue holding the Volume Down button for a few more seconds until you get to the initial Recovery Mode screen. For the stock OnePlus recovery this will be a black screen with three different language options. For a custom recovery this will be the standard TWRP main menu that we all know of. Either way, once you get into Recovery Mode then you can let go of the Volume button and navigate through the OnePlus 6 Recovery Mode menus.

As mentioned, there are a couple other ways that you can boot into Recovery Mode on the OnePlus 6. For instance, you can boot the device into Fastboot Mode and then use the Volume buttons until you have highlighted the Recovery option at the top of the screen. When you see that option up there, simply tap on the Power button and the OnePlus 6 will reboot directly into Recovery Mode. Another method is to first enable Developer Mode and then go into the Developer Options menu to enable the Advanced Reboot feature.

With this feature enabled you will be presented with additional options for Fastboot Mode and Recovery Mode when you tap the Reboot option from within the Power Menu.