HTC One X with black screen but working charging LED, Softbuttons and MTP Access

rien-ne-va-plus

Senior Member
Nov 6, 2010
109
19
18
Hi everyone,

first off, I've spend days now trying to find a fix. If I've missed anything, I'm sorry, it wasn't for lack of trying.

Here's the situation: I have acquired an HTC One X earlier this year which has worked quite flawlessly. I went ahead and unlocked the bootloader and installed a custom recovery. However, since I handed the phone off to my not-so-techy sister I did not use a custom ROM, and after the HTC update failed with the custom recovery I reversed that as well. The device should now be stock everything with unlocked bootloader.

After a few months my sister encountered heavy problems, though. She described them as battery related (wouldn't turn on correctly) and eventually she moved to a new phone. Now I have gotten the device back and I am trying to fix it. After charging it I managed to have it boot once. However, I but it to the side and wanted it to load some more. Ever since then the screen doesn't come on. The charging LED seems to work fine (eventually switched from red to green, too, indicating that the device is fully charged) and the button backlight still works, too. Most significantly though, the device is recognized as MTP device in Windows: I can access all the data in the storage without problems.

I have read that there is an issue with the HTC One X and the display connector so eventually I went ahead and took the device apart. It's lying in front of me now in pieces, but I still couldn't get the screen to come alive. The obvious conclusion would be to buy a new screen but the device doesn't feel like it's worth the investment. Besides, I would like to know for sure that it's the screen before I do anything.

So I turn to you guys and ask if you have any idea how I could access the phone via my computer. I tried to boot it up in bootloader mode but due to the strange standby methods HTC is using and not seeing anything on the screen I haven't been able to do that yet: Whenever I connect my USB cable it's recognized as MTP device, not ADB. Debugging seems to be deactivated so that doesn't seem to be an option. Does anyone have any idea how I could get the phone to talk to my computer (i.e. get into the bootloader or ADB screencast for sure)? With my Galaxy S I could simply plug in this dummy micro USB and would be sure to end up in download mode.

Any help is appreciated!

tl;dr: HTC One X screen is dead but LEDs work, is recognized as MTP device. How to make it talk to the computer?

Thanks,
rien
 

rien-ne-va-plus

Senior Member
Nov 6, 2010
109
19
18
Alright, sometimes just posting stuff like this helps already. I was now finally able to get the phone into fastboot (apparently) and it's reacting to the fastboot commands. I suppose the next step is to load CWM and connect via adb. This way I can at least do a factory reset.

Does anyone have any ideas regarding the original issue with the screen? Especially since it does seem to work occasionally. And doesn't show any fragments...

Can I enable USB debug mode from within the recovery to work in the system?