First of all I want to say that I take no responsibility if you brick your phone by following steps from my blog.
The whole process seems to be very familiar if you’ve rooted a nexus device before. With CWM my phone didn’t start anymore so I tried openrecovery which worked like a charme:
Preparation
- Download openrecovery from http://www.androidfilehost.com/?fid=23212708291678610
- If you haven’t already done that download and install the Android SDK tools for your system from http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html. You’ll need to have the Android Platform tools installed
- (Windows only) You may need device drivers for the Nexus 5 under windows – but as I only have ubuntu machines I stick to linux ;-)
- (optional) To be able to restore your phone if something goes wrong it is also advisable to download the factory image from google from https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#hammerheadkrt16m. There are lots of tutorials how to flash this so I’ll also leave this to you.
Installation
- Copy the downloaded openrecovery-twrp-2.6.3.2-hammerhead.img to your android-sdk-linux/platform-tools folder and cd to that folder
- Change to superuser with
sudo su
- Reboot your phone to recovery mode (shut down the phone and hold volume down and power button to turn it on again)
- Check that your device is recogniced with
./fastboot devices
- Unlock the bootloader (This will erase all your data!!!)
./fastboot oem unlock ./fastboot reboot-bootloader sleep 5
- Flash the recovery image with
./fastboot flash recovery openrecovery-twrp-2.6.3.2-hammerhead.img ./fastboot reboot-bootloader sleep 5
- Go to recovery mode (change selection on phone with vol +/- and select with power button)
- In recovery mode choose to reboot the phone from within recovery mode. The application will ask if you want to root the phone. Say yes ;-)
- The phone boots after that. When finished start the SuperSU application which tells you that you haven’t finished yet. Choose TWRP when asked how to finish installation. The phone will reboot again and you are done.
Feel free to post questions. For me it worked exactly as described here.