[Q] PIN Unlock screen - keyboard won't come up

Here we go again.

No sooner did we do a factory reset on my son's phone, but it stopped on us again.

To refresh your memory, my son's phone is a dead stock T Mobile HTC One, never unlocked, never rooted, dead stock.

A week or so ago, it went into a boot loop from which we could not recover. We did a factory reset and everything was fine, for a moment. My son went about reassembling his contacts, music, etc., making sure they were properly backed up this time.

After the factory reset, everything seemed to work fine, for a time. But then the first time my son powered off his phone, charged it overnight while off, and tried to power on again, the PIN unlock screen won't come up, so he can't open his phone.

We can get to the bootloader and to the recovery. Tried wiping the cache from recovery mode, but that didn't help.

Is it time for another factory reset? Is there anything that would have potentially caused both problems loading Android/Sense (the boot loop from before and the failure of the unlock keypad this time) that we should investigate?

I love my own HTC One, but my son's opinion of his is quite different, and it's straining family relationships.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

I will talk to him about apps, but I believe he was using the stock HTC Sense keyboard.

If it's an offending app, will removing the app via his Google account using his laptop and then restarting the phone solve the problem?

Any thoughts as to why this might happen so fast on the heels of the boot loop problem described in my other thread?

Does the Fastboot Erase Cache command do anything different from the Wipe Cache Partition option on the stock Recovery menu? I've tried that already without success.

Thanks for your response.

PhoenixPath said:

Only info I can find on this suggests another Factory reset.

Do you have any idea what apps he may have installed? I have seen that there is some "beta" keyboard software out there that upon expiration will fail to appear, making it all but impossible to unlock. Of note regarding that is Swiftkey beta software. Their forums have quite a few posts regarding this issue.

Sorry I couldn't be more help. I know of no other way around the pin other than a factory reset.

If you can get the device into fastboot mode plugged into a Windows 7 PC perform the following:

fastboot erase cache
use the volume keys to select bootloader and power to active.
use the volume keys to select factory reset and power to activate.

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