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G2 hardware issues, possibly related to flashing?

My G2 has been acting really funky lately, hanging on boot and not being able to "hold" recovery flashes. I'll start from the beginning of my little story.
On Saturday, I wanted to do a nandroid backup from TWRP (not sure which version, an older one but not terribly old). It failed several times. I went back into the OS (CM 12.1) and backed up all apps and app data to an OTG USB via Titanium Backup. This was successful. I tried to go back into TWRP a second time. Nothing. Recovery is not even there, I get a security error from what I believe is fastboot. I went back to CM and tried to re-flash TWRP. Now I get a security error on the LG screen. Nothing would boot, no recovery mode, I did have download mode although I had no PC with me so I didn't know this at the time. I was away last weekend so I had to go without a phone for a day... which was actually... kind of pleasent. Don't ask me why I carried two 32GB USBs and an OTG adapter on my keychain but no laptop, because I have no idea why I would do this, lol.
Came home Sunday afternoon and decided to nuke the whole phone with a TOT flash. Since I always wanted to try CloudyG2 since we all know AOSP-based ROMs don't do the camera justice, I went ahead and TOT flashed, re-rooted, re-AutoRec, etc. Everything worked wonderfully; I did a full wipe in TWRP, flashed in Cloudy, then the KK radio, then Xposed. Played around with things like XCam and a few Xposed modules. Everything was working awesome, so I did my restore in Titanium. Took a few hours, but Titanium says everything went fine (sans for a few CM apps which did not restore by design I guess). I checked out a few apps, all my data is there, wonderful. Titanium told me to restart so after poking around a bit, I went for the restart. Hang on boot. For several hours. Tried to go to recovery, fastboot security error. Seems it can't "hold" recovery or something else that I'm flashing?
Clearly I am doing something incorrect here with flashing and all that, but I can't figure out what. I'm not new to flashing and modding, and I've flashed regular CM updates and other goodies onto this G2 for quite a while with no issues. I'm going through the same steps I would normally with CM, and I've had plenty of success with that. Any ideas what I am doing wrong here?

Had same issue and know I hard bricked it trying to get it fixed ... Off to a different phone I guess .. Not sure why it wouldn't hold a recovery either after a few hours ... I gave up .. Good luck
Sent from my SCH-I535 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

Cannot boot any ROM

Ok, I think I'm in a deeper trouble than usual.
I've made a nandroid backup like usual and flashed the latest Dirty Unicorns ROM (http://forum.xda-developers.com/nex...-dirty-unicorns-v10-0-official-6-0-1-t3326798). It didn't work as well as I had hoped - was getting force-closes on practically everything. So I wanted to restore the backup. It restored, but didn't load. Odd, so I thought let's restart the phone. So I did, but the phone just kept sitting on the DU logo and not load at all. Ok, so let's clear both Dalvik and Cache. Still doesn't boot, just sits on the logo. Ok, let's factory-reset the phone, re-download, re-install the ROM, clear everything and try again - still the same, never boots. Ok, super weird by now, never happened to me before. Already took out the trusty old Nexus 5 as the backup, as things are getting more complicated.
So I tried flashing two other ROMs (CM13 and Exodus), but the same thing happens - it just sits on the respective ROM's logo. Can anyone tell me what's happening? I'm including a pic of my bootloader. Looking at the BL and Baseband values, they looks different - are they supposed to be the same?

Might be worth going back to the latest stock build to get all your firmware in order then flash a different rom afterwards.

Ok, don't know why or how it happened, but my TWRP version was still on 2.8.x.x, even though I'm sure I flashed the newest one. I flashed the 3.0.2.0 again, but the situation is still the same.

brichardson1991 said:
Might be worth going back to the latest stock build to get all your firmware in order then flash a different rom afterwards.
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From here? http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-6p/development/rom-nexus6p-stock-roms-t3234067

From here sorry: https://developers.google.com/android/nexus/images#angler
if you get stuck follow Heisenberg's guide step 10 :
10. How To Flash The Factory Images (And Return To Stock)
http://forum.xda-developers.com/nexus-6p/general/guides-how-to-guides-beginners-t3206928

Yep, all good now. Followed all the steps, loaded stock images, flashed custom recovery, followed by the ROM, all good now. Thanks a bunch!

Was too quick to report success - now my SIM doesn't work. It populates the APNs, says LTE from the quick slide menu, but stays on no signal in the status bar, plus errors out when refreshing web pages, etc.
I've tried flashing different (including the latest) vendor images as well as different radios.
EDIT: never mind; the freaking Mobile Data was turned off (why the **** does it happen?). Turned it back on; all good now.

Frustrated after installing O and downgrading to N.. things aren't the same

TL;DR O was janky after dirty flash so downgraded but now N isn't right even after super wiping everything and reflashing stock N image.
Ok so I have no idea why I decided to try out O with all the dumb bugs that are being reported and the lack of a simple night light enabler but I did anyway. Phone was working great on 7.1.2, had the night light and blue pixel accents, the round icons actually just showed up for me which I like better than all the craziness of 5 different shaped icons cluttering up everything.
I dirty flashed stable O and it was janky as hell so after a few hours I decided to downgrade using my nandroid backup I just made. All seemed fine until I got in my car and noticed Bluetooth share was broken which kept causing force closes. I tried everything to fix it but nothing worked, had to end up reflashing latest N image. From that point all went downhill.
Phone will not show all the round icons anymore no matter what (play store being one that I totally despise being that huge play button, music, games, photos, movies, maps, etc but phone, messages, camera contacts and a few other are working), assistant would not enable and only screen search was there, Google drive backup isn't working either even with turning it off and on but it just says it's disabled by the administrator (??), I even went in to twrp and wiped EVERYTHING 3 times under the advanced menu and chose to repair the system and then fully ADB flashed the stock N image again.
After that, I rooted with magisk but now BusyBox won't install as systemless to the su/bin folder, I flashed both the night light only and the full pixel mod from gerard hoping it would enable the round icons on the GNL but it didn't. I tried flashfire to flash the N system again to clean that up but it just turned the phone off every attempt. I finally got it to work by reinstalling magisk but it didn't actually flash the system even though it went through the motions and said it was successful. I had to do it again for it to work but everything just seems weird now. What the F am I doing wrong? I know it's not a pixel thing for the round icons bc my wife's Moto z force just got 7.1 this weekend and the round icons showed up for her with no mods, no root, and she has GNL like me.
Help?

Try downloading a custom ROM like Nitrogen or Aquarius. Both of those have the options you want without having to flash any other mods. As for Google Assistant I've only had luck using Beans Gapps full package or open Gapps stock package. I personally prefer Beans. Do a full wipe before you flash and you should be good.

First of all, you went from N to O with a dirty Flash.... Of course there will be bugs. If you want to go back to N, Flash N image(boot, vendor, radio, system), when it boots up, go to settings and then perform a factory reset. After that, you can restore your Nandroid backup.

Thanks All,
Yes I do understand the issues with going from N to O on a dirty flash which is why it was janky and I decided to roll back. As mentioned, I used TWRP to wipe everything 3 times and then reflashed the latest stock N image. Google assistant worked after doing that and the interesting thing I found was if I disabled or deleted apps from the phone and then redownloaded or reenabled them, the round icons began showing again (i.e. google play, docs, sheets, etc) so that issue is resolved. I did not use the nandroid backup I made, I basically just started over from scratch and even though the Google Drive backup is still showing "disabled by your administrator", I see a new backup that was made this morning at 6:13am. I also installed busybox through magisk now rather than the separate app so I guess the only thing left outstanding is why the phone still says the Drive backup is disabled by an admin.

I would grab Nexus Root Toolkit, I install to C:\NRT, download the full August Nougat image, save it to C:\NRT too, then do a complete stock restore, this will wipe everything off phone.
Put you back to starting line and then race with flashing and mods.

ossito2012 said:
I would grab Nexus Root Toolkit, I install to C:\NRT, download the full August Nougat image, save it to C:\NRT too, then do a complete stock restore, this will wipe everything off phone.
Put you back to starting line and then race with flashing and mods.
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I did use wug's toolkit to flash over ADB. I wonder if the image might have been slightly messed up even though the SHA-256 matched. I could always try to redownload the image again. I was going to wait until 8.0.1 was released to try O again but when I did have O, the backup options were stuck on "waiting for backup" (the menus are slightly different in O) and it never seemed to move forward. I researched that and I guess it's a known issue with some phones and a fix is supposed to be coming out this month but at this point, who knows.

jrg67 said:
I did use wug's toolkit to flash over ADB. I wonder if the image might have been slightly messed up even though the SHA-256 matched. I could always try to redownload the image again. I was going to wait until 8.0.1 was released to try O again but when I did have O, the backup options were stuck on "waiting for backup" (the menus are slightly different in O) and it never seemed to move forward. I researched that and I guess it's a known issue with some phones and a fix is supposed to be coming out this month but at this point, who knows.
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Toolkit? FFS- fully wipe your device and install full 8.0 image. Done. That is what a full image is for --> janky.

v12xke said:
Toolkit? FFS- fully wipe your device and install full 8.0 image. Done. That is what a full image is for --> janky.
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I don't think you are fully understanding what the situation is. I have said now 2 or 3 times, I have completely wiped the phone 3 times in a row using twrps advanced settings and I flashed the latest stock N image. The only reason I used wugs toolkit was so I didn't have to ype out all the commands to flash. After the flash was done, I manually flashed twrp again and re-rooting using magisk. Anyway, things are mostly back to normal now. I will manually flash O again at a later time.

jrg67 said:
I don't think you are fully understanding what the situation is. I have said now 2 or 3 times, I have completely wiped the phone 3 times in a row using twrps advanced settings and I flashed the latest stock N image. The only reason I used wugs toolkit was so I didn't have to ype out all the commands to flash. After the flash was done, I manually flashed twrp again and re-rooting using magisk. Anyway, things are mostly back to normal now. I will manually flash O again at a later time.
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Still wrong. Nuclear flash everything even wiping the whole twrp since its a huge leap from N under the hood. Never dirty flash and of course clean flashing still won't be enough. Do a nuclear flash, wipe everything including your storage and recovery, back it up. Don't be lazy then be frustrated at a plethora of bugs if you didn't even flash properly.

phantom146 said:
Still wrong. Nuclear flash everything even wiping the whole twrp since its a huge leap from N under the hood. Never dirty flash and of course clean flashing still won't be enough. Do a nuclear flash, wipe everything including your storage and recovery, back it up. Don't be lazy then be frustrated at a plethora of bugs if you didn't even flash properly.
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To be clear, what do you mean by "nuclear flash" bc I'm pretty sure that is exactly what I did, 3 times. Wiped dalvik/art, system, data, userdata, cache from twrp. As for wiping the recovery, that gets done during the flash of the image. So I ask again, what did I miss? Also, it's been said many times that dirty flashing can cause issues, I get it. I wasn't being lazy with trying to get back to N which is the whole point of this thread.

Weird Issue when Flashing ROM's

I haven't followed development of the 6T since November so please forgive me if this has been answered 100 times.
The steps to flashing custom non-OOS ROM's is to; flash ROM/flash TWRP installer/reboot recovery/flash gapps/flash magisk
The weird issue for me is when I reboot recovery after flashing the ROM and TWRP when I go to install gapps all my files are encrypted. My way around this was to sideload gapps and magisk and everything booted up fine. When I go back to recovery after the first boot all the files are normal again.
This has happened both times I've flashed a ROM.
I'm sure this has an easy answer and it's most likely due to a step I didn't execute properly -- or at all. I did a lot of reading and making sure I understood the process before rooting my device but as far as flashing ROM's I was noticing a lot of conflicting info which I've never seen before on any other device. Anyway, other than this I haven't had any issue.
Thanks for any feedback.

Security issue. Best way around it is to either format data before flashing and/or remove your lockscreen security pin before flashing.

Deleted

ogkillergreen said:
Security issue. Best way around it is to either format data before flashing and/or remove your lockscreen security pin before flashing.
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I never use any lock. Always just use Swype to unlock. I'm aware of the issue with using a lock though. I read that people had problems. I just haven't seen where any one brought up my exact issue. It doesn't seem to effect anything so I'm not stressing it too bad. Eventually I'll get around to troubleshooting it.

I've flashed almost every ROM for 6T till now and every time I flash a ROM I'm having exactly the same issue as you. I've also tried formatting data several times, but the issue with unreadable data in TWRP after flashing a ROM returns every single time. I've tried multiple combinations of flashing, wiping etc. and it's always the same. However, what I'm doing in such case is flashing gapps + magisk from USB-C pendrive, no need to sideload, just mount USB and flash files from that as usual. After doing that I can boot to ROM and the data is readable again. I just need to remember to have this pendrive close to me when I'm flashing a new ROM.

BreathingWounds said:
I've flashed almost every ROM for 6T till now and every time I flash a ROM I'm having exactly the same issue as you. I've also tried formatting data several times, but the issue with unreadable data in TWRP after flashing a ROM returns every single time. I've tried multiple combinations of flashing, wiping etc. and it's always the same. However, what I'm doing in such case is flashing gapps + magisk from USB-C pendrive, no need to sideload, just mount USB and flash files from that as usual. After doing that I can boot to ROM and the data is readable again. I just need to remember to have this pendrive close to me when I'm flashing a new ROM.
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Thanks for the tip and info. I don't mind sideloading because it's fast and anytime I mess with my phone it's when I'm at my PC. I've been using adb for so many years it's my go-to whenever my phone is acting stupid.
The second time I flashed a ROM I didn't even worry about flashing gapps, just magisk. And I stacked them. So ROM, TWRP, Magisk. Then rebooted system. I actually prefer this anyway because then you boot straight to the launcher with no setup process. Then I go back and flash GAPPS. I actually have used this flashing process for years because I hate the setup after a first time boot.

I am having problems flashing stock rom and locking bootloader

So basically, few months ago i tried to root the phone, get new recovery and different rom. If I remember correctly I got stuck trying to get custom recovery to work, because everytime I restarted phone it would be replaced by the stock one. So I left the phone as it was, and disabled the TWRP app on it. Problem was, I could not update phone. Today I tried to completely revert to stock.
I flashed stock recovery but when I tried to install update from the phone storage, it did not even give me option to select a file.
I tried to update the recovery to newer one which gave me the option to select a file, but the installation got canceled after few seconds, putting me back on the file selection screen in recovery.
I tried to instal TWRP but I can't even boot into it at all because the phone is just stuck with blackscreen and lightblue led light.
I tried to ADB sideload the newest stock rom that I downloaded from OP5 site but this one went to around 50% and then crashed as well.
I also tried to do the update using the Settings>System update > Local Upgrade but this one also fails once it gets into recovery.
I tried wiping cache/reset system settings or wiping every data on the phone before any update but none of it seems to help and everytime I restart the phone afterwards the TWRP app is still there needing an update.
I tried to just lock the bootloader but I got the "Your device is corrupt. It can't be trusted and will not boot" message followed by link to google support. I assume that is because of the TWRP app that is on the phone but I can't get rid of it no matter what I try. I tried searching for people having simillar problems but I couldn't find anything that would help me.
Any suggestions?
Thanks in advance.

You can go with the last resort and use the Unbrick tool.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/oneplus-5/how-to/guide-unbrick-guide-hard-bricked-t3761706