There seems to be no way of booting into recovery using hardware buttons from power off. I tried rocking the volume button, power button volume down combo, power button volume up combo to no avail. Power button volume up combo brings up the stock reset menu, and confirmation resets the phone back to stock. (Previously with Pressy Pie's CWM recovery, confirmation of stock reset resulted in booting into recovery and avoiding reset.) Luckily I was able to boot into recovery using Quick Boot app from stock reset. (Root was kept). From there I restored nandroid. Initially, when I tried doing the full restore I was met with error message that data partition wasn't mounted, even though I made sure it was already mounted. So I rebooted back into recovery from Quick Boot App and the second time I tried doing a full restore I was still met with same data partition mount error. I was finally able to complete restore by selecting only the data partition to restore. (The other partitions restored the first time.)
Is there any way to boot into recovery using hardware buttons when the phone is powered off? This is a MAJOR ISSUE!!