#phonerepair — Public Fediverse posts

About six years ago, a friend gave me a review sample Nexus 6P that I lost to the boot loop of death only a couple of months later, caused by a known CPU core overheat issue. I finally resurrected the damn thing. This is my story.

The biggest challenge - the one that's eluded me for six-odd years, in fact - was getting it to stop boot looping long enough to get into the OS and unlock developer mode.

Things that didn't work:

• freezing it
• leaving it running on an ice pack
• heating its CPU from the outside with a heat gun set to 300 degrees Celcius

I also didn't realise at the time that the phone couldn't charge properly when looping or while in the bootloader - battery issues are another key failure point in this phone, the first Huawei-made Nexus, which honestly had some teething problems.

However, I did think that the battery might have lost condition in storage due to its distressed red led flashes.

So I connected it to a wildly overpowered USB-C charger - specifically, the Steam Deck's 45W charger - as this has helped with other flaky batteries - and left it connected for a couple of hours while I went and baked a cake.

It did help, but not quite for the reason I expected - it somehow squeezed 3% of charge into the battery and in the process also heated the phone.

Not expecting anything at all, I picked it up and tried powering it on... success! Android booted. It had clearly got hot enough while charging to freak out and trigger low-performance mode.

Connected to my PC via a USB-C cable, I kept it alive long enough to hammer on the the build number in the phone's settings to unlock the Developer Mode menus, and then unlock the bootloader, confirm that it wasn't OEM locked and turn on USB debugging.

From there, this tutorial is solid, and includes working links to a modified boot image that disables the two big cores that are the most frequent cause of boot loops in this model:
https://www.xda-developers.com/nexus-6p-bootloop-fix/

NB: don't flash TWRP unless you want to have to learn a whole new skillset. It's not required to just make the phone work, and is in fact counterproductive.

The phone is staying on Android version 7.2.1 for the forseeable, and it's honestly a significantly nicer OS than Android 13.

Anyway, Small Owlbear gets an excessively nice device for games/photography/family messaging (I had to trick the parental controls into letting me install Element there), and I get to finally remove Android from my own phone.

Further useful information and resources:
https://www.ifixit.com/News/36821/dark-magic-what-caused-googles-nexus-6p-death-loop-and-how-to-fix-it-with-a-hairdryer
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-unlock-root-flash-for-nexus-6p.3206928/
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/guide-fix-for-nexus-6p-bootloop-of-death-8-22-android-o-working.3640279/

#Android #nexus6p #PhoneRepair #tinkering