How to root my HTC One M8 (Android 6.0)?

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FlexMcMurphy

Member
Dec 8, 2019
15
1
Hi Judith,

The short answer is... if at all possible I highly recommend you simply upgrade to a newer phone. After seven years I recently finally upgraded my HTC One M8 to a Pixel 4a. The Pixel I got was second hand so I got it for a good price. It's totally un-necessary to spend obscene sums of money on smartphones. But equally you can get a perfectly good one with recent tech for reasonable prices especially if you buy second hand.

If you can't or don't want to upgrade your phone then... you should NOT need to Root the HTC One M8 to be able to continue using it. Although the Android OS that comes on the HTC One M8 by now is so old that it might not be the most secure to have on your phone.

But I never had the problem you described with the phone being almost totally full from bloatware. If you don't have any media on the phone then there should be plenty of space in it's internal storage. You can also add an external SD card and save all your media to that.

Have you tried doing a proper Factory reset? Settings > Backup & reset > Reset phone > OK.
This should restore the phone to a state where there is still plenty of space in the internal storage, even after subsequent updates are applied.
If you haven't then you should definitely try a Factory reset although you should BACKUP anything you don't want to loose first!

If I were you I would sooner pay around £100 and get a decent second hand phone than waste any time rooting the HTC One M8. By now it is about 8 years old hardware so no matter what rooted OS you put on it then it will still be painfully slow and sluggish and only get moreso with each passing month as websites are designed and upgraded to require faster and more powerful phones to work properly.

Cheers,

Flex
 
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Judiver

Member
Apr 1, 2017
15
1
Hi Flex,

Thank you for your reaction and advice.

I bought this phone as a 2nd hand phone in 2017. I'm not using my mobile phone a lot. I'm old fashioned, I use my fixed phone and laptop. So I don't want to invest in a new (2nd hand) phone but am willing to invest some time to make my phone usable again and last as long as possible. If I can.

I made a back-up with HTC sync manager (never bothered to make back-ups before - there's not much on my phone... my contacts are on my sim card anyway). Later-on (after factory reset and trying to retrieve my back-up) I received a notification that HTC sync manager has stopped end 2020, so I'm going to delete that program. Don't like it away. I quickly got annoyed by it asking a code all the time, and not having my phone files simply accessible in File Explorer. I probably better should have made a back-up with Google Drive.

After the back-up I spent lots of time because the power button didn't work, for some reason... Finally got that fixed. I did a factory reset. First things: get rid of the French (I live in France but am Dutch and always have everything in English on my appliances) and French azerty keyboard and disable prediction dictionaries. Immediately I got a notification to install an English dictionary. Powering off/on helped to get the rid of the notification but for how long... as I've had that before. At first it repeatedly gave me the message that Google app unfortunately had stopped (I've seen that before too...). I tried powering off, delete cache, un/reinstall app etc. and in the end I don't know what did the trick but the app is working now. Better still, all seems to be working.

And you're right : the factory reset gives me about 8GB (despite all the annoying bloatware that I disabled immediately - they only eat power and space), enough to put my few useful apps on it again. Let's see if my phone stays powered or still continues to misbehave despite the extra gigabytes. For the moment I have high hopes.

So thanks a lot for your help/advice! I would have had a much bigger battle to fight if I'd have to unlock, root and flash it.

I really appreciate having forum like this where people are willing to help others (y)(y)(y).

Judith

(y)(y)(y)
 

FlexMcMurphy

Member
Dec 8, 2019
15
1
I'm glad my advice helped you Judith. But just to give you a heads up... that old phone will be a frustration for you due to being slow and gradually things just not working on it anymore. For instance, I have two gmail accounts but was only able to access one of them from the gmail app on my HTC... instead I had to use the Gmail website not the Gmail app to get to the other account. OK that's not a big sacrifice but really for small money you could have a phone that isn't frustrating and limited to use. Just my opinion.
 

Judiver

Member
Apr 1, 2017
15
1
Yes I know. Of course it is outdated and more so with time. But I'm not frustrated by it not being able to do things, or as quickly as possible. I don't read my email on my phone. It's not synched. I never go on the internet with my phone, unless I travel. In fact I hate it to be in a society where everyone is looking on their phone all day, and thus not actually there and aware of their surroundings. I also hate the idea of the possibility that one could follow all my moves (but that unfortunately already happens with credit/bank cards, computers, street cameras etc.). Proof of my Covid vaccination is on paper, I don't want the app. We live in Orwell's Big Brother is watching you society, where data on you is collected everywhere without you knowing it. A whole social discussion, here is not the place... But society obliges you to have a mobile phone, if only to receive security codes by sms (from my bank when I'm doing my accounting...) or fill in a mobile phone n# on a form to sign up for something, even on official web pages. In fact I use my mobile phone when I'm obliged to, when prompted. I hardly ever use it by my own choice. I largely prefer fixed phones and computers. I would just want it to be reliable to do the few things I do need it for.

I'm just annoyed by the bloatware and updates of stuff I don't want/need but have no control over. I hate it when companies try to force things on me (like Facebook... next to the app itself the phone keeps installing Facebook for HTC Sense - I'm not on social media at all). And I'm frustrated because my phone misbehaves. It powered off again this morning :cry: when I deactivated an app I never use. In turning the phone on, I got stuck on the HTC screen. The battery drained. I got out of the boot loop but then the calendar stopped. And so on. It seems there's a problem other than the storage space, software instability or battery... Sometimes the battery really decreases fast, like something is in a loop. The phone may also power off long before the battery is at 0%. I already calibrated it several times over the past months.

I may have to buy another phone, but it feels like a waste of money for the use I make of it. I can think of a million things that would be much more useful and/or urgent to me (getting my cat the expensive surgery it needs for one thing). Let's see if it really continues to power off at the tiniest thing I do with it. If it only happens once ever so often I'm not buying another phone.

Thank Flex
 

Scragge

Member
Jan 24, 2016
22
2
Yes I know. Of course it is outdated and more so with time. But I'm not frustrated by it not being able to do things, or as quickly as possible. I don't read my email on my phone. It's not synched. I never go on the internet with my phone, unless I travel. In fact I hate it to be in a society where everyone is looking on their phone all day, and thus not actually there and aware of their surroundings. I also hate the idea of the possibility that one could follow all my moves (but that unfortunately already happens with credit/bank cards, computers, street cameras etc.). Proof of my Covid vaccination is on paper, I don't want the app. We live in Orwell's Big Brother is watching you society, where data on you is collected everywhere without you knowing it. A whole social discussion, here is not the place... But society obliges you to have a mobile phone, if only to receive security codes by sms (from my bank when I'm doing my accounting...) or fill in a mobile phone n# on a form to sign up for something, even on official web pages. In fact I use my mobile phone when I'm obliged to, when prompted. I hardly ever use it by my own choice. I largely prefer fixed phones and computers. I would just want it to be reliable to do the few things I do need it for.

I'm just annoyed by the bloatware and updates of stuff I don't want/need but have no control over. I hate it when companies try to force things on me (like Facebook... next to the app itself the phone keeps installing Facebook for HTC Sense - I'm not on social media at all). And I'm frustrated because my phone misbehaves. It powered off again this morning :cry: when I deactivated an app I never use. In turning the phone on, I got stuck on the HTC screen. The battery drained. I got out of the boot loop but then the calendar stopped. And so on. It seems there's a problem other than the storage space, software instability or battery... Sometimes the battery really decreases fast, like something is in a loop. The phone may also power off long before the battery is at 0%. I already calibrated it several times over the past months.

I may have to buy another phone, but it feels like a waste of money for the use I make of it. I can think of a million things that would be much more useful and/or urgent to me (getting my cat the expensive surgery it needs for one thing). Let's see if it really continues to power off at the tiniest thing I do with it. If it only happens once ever so often I'm not buying another phone.

Thank Flex
I first have to say I had an M8 as my last phone and loved it, those were great phones. The M8 is one of the easyist phones to root.

1. Unlock the bootloader - careful to make backups before this step, when you do so it wipes the phone back to factory.
2. Using ADB flash Twrp
3. Reboot to Twerp and flash SU or Magisk
4. Happy dance, your phone is rooted and has a really nice custom recovery.


Seriously though, there are guides in the M8 forums which will take you step by step through the process.
 

Judiver

Member
Apr 1, 2017
15
1
Hi Scragge,

Thank you for reacting.

Yes its a nice phone although compared to the one I had before it (a Samsung Galaxy S SCL) I think the sound is of lesser quality (or has my hearing deteriorated since?) and the camera too. But other than that, I do like it. Like the looks of it too, though the metal is making it rather heavy (extra weight whilst hiking). I bought it when phones got bigger and bigger and the size of this phone still allowed me to put it in the pocket of my hiking pants. A very elegant hiking phone ;), for emergency calls only (as most of the time, no coverage in the mountains).

I did see the instructions at the top of this thread and in more detail on other pages on how to root. But my question to unlock/root actually was related to the fact that 1) if it still is possible to unlock and 2) I suspected that my phone's problems came from lack of storage space. A factory reset gave me enough storage but the phone still powered off be itself this morning. So it's not the lack of storage that is causing the problem. Rooting/flashing would let me get rid of the annoying bloatware, but since I now have enough space all those apps are less annoying (I had stripped my phone of all useful stuff because it was full of default crap).

So... software or hardware problem?

I will try to boot to safe mode. I read here (https://community.giffgaff.com/d/15536081-htc-one-m8-turning-itself-off) that if the problem doesn't (re)appear in safe mode, then it's probably caused by an app. After the factory reset the only 2 apps I put on it are WhatsApp and an app that I use to hike (enabling me to follow and record GPS trails etc.) with some onboard hiking maps. If those 2 apps are not the culprit, nor software updates, then unlocking/footing/flashing will most likely not solve anything because it's not software related. I don't think factory software can cause problems....? At least, that's my reasoning...

If it's hardware, the problem may be the battery, as it has acted strangely in the past (no power left whereas battery is not at 0% and sometimes draining real fast). And if it is a hardware problem than I'd better buy a new phone instead of spending money to repair this one.

So rooting (which for me would be 1st time, so scary) is not needed (I have enough storage space) cq. will not help (problem lies elsewhere), but I appreciate your thoughts.
 

Scragge

Member
Jan 24, 2016
22
2
Hi Scragge,

Thank you for reacting.

Yes its a nice phone although compared to the one I had before it (a Samsung Galaxy S SCL) I think the sound is of lesser quality (or has my hearing deteriorated since?) and the camera too. But other than that, I do like it. Like the looks of it too, though the metal is making it rather heavy (extra weight whilst hiking). I bought it when phones got bigger and bigger and the size of this phone still allowed me to put it in the pocket of my hiking pants. A very elegant hiking phone ;), for emergency calls only (as most of the time, no coverage in the mountains).

I did see the instructions at the top of this thread and in more detail on other pages on how to root. But my question to unlock/root actually was related to the fact that 1) if it still is possible to unlock and 2) I suspected that my phone's problems came from lack of storage space. A factory reset gave me enough storage but the phone still powered off be itself this morning. So it's not the lack of storage that is causing the problem. Rooting/flashing would let me get rid of the annoying bloatware, but since I now have enough space all those apps are less annoying (I had stripped my phone of all useful stuff because it was full of default crap).

So... software or hardware problem?

I will try to boot to safe mode. I read here (https://community.giffgaff.com/d/15536081-htc-one-m8-turning-itself-off) that if the problem doesn't (re)appear in safe mode, then it's probably caused by an app. After the factory reset the only 2 apps I put on it are WhatsApp and an app that I use to hike (enabling me to follow and record GPS trails etc.) with some onboard hiking maps. If those 2 apps are not the culprit, nor software updates, then unlocking/footing/flashing will most likely not solve anything because it's not software related. I don't think factory software can cause problems....? At least, that's my reasoning...

If it's hardware, the problem may be the battery, as it has acted strangely in the past (no power left whereas battery is not at 0% and sometimes draining real fast). And if it is a hardware problem than I'd better buy a new phone instead of spending money to repair this one.

So rooting (which for me would be 1st time, so scary) is not needed (I have enough storage space) cq. will not help (problem lies elsewhere), but I appreciate your thoughts.
It should still be possible to unlock the boot loader, but it has been a long time since I've tried any thing with an M8. My last go-around was installing Linage17 and rooting with SU, it seemed to run fine.
Your battery may just be giving up or it may still be a software issue. Many of the apps on my M8 were not able to be updated when the developers stopped supporting A6. Could it be possible some of the stock software is still trying to do whatever background thing it does in normal operation and eating up battery because it can't connect to somewhere long gone? Just guessing. If you look at some of the de-bloating guides, the M8 came with a with a good compliment of bloatware. It is daunting to delve into rooting for the first time, but rooting and de-bloating or changing the ROM to something like linage17 might help. The reason I mention L17, it was the last ROM I flashed to one of my M8 phones before moving to a different device.

Good luck on whichever path you decide on.

Scragge
 

Judiver

Member
Apr 1, 2017
15
1
Hi Scragge,

Your suggestion that my problems may have something to do with updates is very interesting. As I said I had stripped every custom installed app (except WhatsApp and the hiking app), as there was no storage space left. Those 2 apps are actually also the only 2 I have re-installed. So the possibility of my problems coming from a custom installed app are fairly limited. As opposed to that there are a lot of default/bloatware apps and the idea of one (or more) of them looking for stuff that isn't there any longer sounds very plausible to me. It would explain that the battery drains sometimes really quickly. In that case rooting and flashing may indeed be useful and possibly worth a try: a clean ROM exempt of all those (to me) useless apps of which one or more may create my problems.

I do not know what Linage17 is (I saw somewhere that it's been updated to 17.1), i.e. in which way it differs/is better from other ROMs. At the top of this thread a link to TWRP, for custom recovery, is given (which leads to a page that's no longer there, but you can look up your device (and I suppose I would need "Primary Europe" and then twrp-3.0.0-0-m8.img). Not sure what to do with the files in the "Device tree". Then a link is given to SuperSU to root. But no ROM file is given. Now that I think of it, Redpoint73 was so kind as to help me to get a connection working again by using RUU a couple of years back. But I suppose that is the official ROM, not what I would need now.

It is curious that I gained 8GB by the factory reset. I wonder what were all those GB that the factory reset disposed off. Hidden cache (I regularly delete cache in apps, whenever I have a problem), temp files, memory dumps, logs?

Ah there's one thing I don't like about this phone: in doing a factory reset (and not using a back-up file to restore the very few things I had on it) my block list is gone. So now I get all these stupid messages again but it is not possible to simply open the message and add it to the block list. I need to go to the block list and add it there manually, thus remembering or noting the phone number. But in some cases there's no phone number but a name, and you cannot add text to the block list. It would have been much more simple to just press a button "add to blocked contacts" whilst in the the message. Oh well...

Thanks Scragge for your enlightening idea.
 

dRkBlooD

New member
Jan 11, 2011
4
0
Guys !!! It finally did work for me..
FIXXED !!
The trick for truly unlocking the bootloader and acces to flashing things like Recovery etc is to SELECT ONE M7 (instead of the real M8) from the HTCDev.com drop-menu, before starting the full procedure of Unlocking on their site.

Just simply FLASHING THE M7 Unlock_code.bin worked like a charm, after so many failed attempts !!!

Good luck <3
 

Judiver

Member
Apr 1, 2017
15
1
dRkBlooD,

I shouldn't react as I'm not a guy (at least... the last time I checked I wasn't), but I wlll keep this in mind. Congrats for succeeding and thanks for sharing.

Judith
 
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    The bootloader screen will indicate the bootloader status (LOCKED, UNLOCKED or RELOCKED) near the top of the screen.

    In general, the process is:
    1) Unlock the bootloader by HTCDev.com (if its not already unlocked).
    2) Fastboot flash TWRP 3.0 custom recovery: https://twrp.me/devices/htconem8gsm.html
    3) Backup your stock ROM in TWRP - lots of folks have been running into bootloop or no boot after trying to root (but probably usually when trying to use an obsolete version TWRP and/or SuperSU - but it never hurts to be safe and have a backup).
    4) In TWRP, flash SuperSU v2.76 to root: https://download.chainfire.eu/969/SuperSU/UPDATE-SuperSU-v2.76-20160630161323.zip
    3
    Thanks for the answer. Just one more question. My bootloader is already unlocked, but it says "S-ON" under "UNLOCKED", will that be a problem?

    Nope, that is just fine. S-on is perfectly okay for most mods, such as root, and flashing ROMs.

    You only need s-off to do some very specific things, such as flashing modified hboots, manually flashing radio, changing CID&MID, downgrading by RUU, etc.
    1
    The bootloader screen will indicate the bootloader status (LOCKED, UNLOCKED or RELOCKED) near the top of the screen.

    In general, the process is:
    1) Unlock the bootloader by HTCDev.com (if its not already unlocked).
    2) Fastboot flash TWRP 3.0 custom recovery: https://twrp.me/devices/htconem8gsm.html
    3) Backup your stock ROM in TWRP - lots of folks have been running into bootloop or no boot after trying to root (but probably usually when trying to use an obsolete version TWRP and/or SuperSU - but it never hurts to be safe and have a backup).
    4) In TWRP, flash SuperSU v2.76 to root: https://download.chainfire.eu/969/SuperSU/UPDATE-SuperSU-v2.76-20160630161323.zip

    Thanks for the answer. Just one more question. My bootloader is already unlocked, but it says "S-ON" under "UNLOCKED", will that be a problem?
    1
    I'm not sure what are you talking about since I'm new to the whole thing I believe that firewater has something to do with S-off which is something I couldn't do because all the guides says download firewater and the links takes me to sunshine which i believe cost me money to do ? sorry correct me if I'm wrong but I'm just a newbie beside I don't need s-off right ? what does that have to do with my problem ?

    Firewater was an all-in-one kit used to unlock bootloader and achieve s-off. The guys that created this went on to create Sunshine, leaving firewater project behind, so any guides from 2014 are likely obsolete. Unlocking the bootloader is as simple as going to htcdev.com, making an account and following the instructions there-it's super easy. S-off isn't necessary for most.
    1
    yes that what I have done exactly I'v unlocked the bootloader this way then used the all in one kit to root but then couldn't s-off as the guide I was following said download firewater and the links take me to sunshine . I don't know much further have not tried sunshine yet and now my rom seems ok after I re-flashed it awesome rom btw still little curious about s-rom but this one will do just fine I'v been using stock for ages .

    Firewater and the AIO (all-in-one) toolkit are 2 different things. Firewater is an (obsolete) s-off method. May have also contained a temp root, and some other things (can't remember exactly, it's been 2 years - and doesn't matter anyway - see more below). But firewater is not typically referred to as a "toolkit" or "all-in-one" (never seen it referred to that way, actually).

    All-in-one toolkit (there are a couple) is a PC for unlocking the bootloader, root, and several other things (may have had a link for firewater, don't remember - again it's irrelevant for reasons below).

    The toolkits are not recommended. They haven't been updated in a long time, and therefore use very obsolete files for TWRP and SuperSU (when applicable). You will have issues flashing many ROMs with old TWRP (and I'm surprised you haven't yet). Plus, you will probably find in bootloader and fastboot getvar, that the OS number is now blank (known bug in old versions of TWRP). I would suggest flashing the current version TWRP 3.1.1 using fastboot, to prevent issues moving forward. Current TWRP is fully compatible with current ROMs - but will not fix the bug of OS number being blank (need to flash firmware or RUU to fix that - but it's just a minor thing).

    Firewater doesn't work, no matter what you do. It required an online server component, which the devs took offline over 2 years ago. Sunshine ($25 US) is the only current s-off method. But be aware, that most folks don't need s-off. S-off isn't needed to root, flash custom ROMs, and most other mods. s-off is only needed for very specific things, such as manually flashing radios, changing CID/MID, and some other things.