Need help restoring my pixel 5

[musiv2]

Good morning all I need some help unbricking my pixel 5. I have exhausted all possible avenues that I'm aware of to restore my phone out of bootloop. At the time I messed it up I was attempting to use twrp. In an attempt to fix the phone I tried flashing the system,and boot to no avail repeatedly getting the error "boot.img missing command-line or os version" as well as using the flash all from the stock firmware file. The current active slot is b and the a/b partition thing is new to me so I'm sure somewhere along the way I missed something. Any help is greatly appreciated .

 

[swangjang]

Could you try this fastboot command and see if it works?

fastboot --set-active=a

 

[musiv2]

I did try that however I'm not sure i was doing it correctly is it typed the way you typed it out?

 

[mangojain]

Reboot the phone into the bootloader, look up how to do that if you don't know how, and then manually flash a rom or use the Android Flash Tool. The latter option is recommended if you are a novice.

 

[musiv2]

I wouldn't say I'm novice lol but more out of the game too long either way thank you for your assistance I will try that as soon as I get a chance and report back

 

[musiv2]

UPDATE your advice worked and I was able to reboot properly thank you in a side note is it impossible at this time to install twrp on a pixel 5?

 

[V0latyle]

UPDATE your advice worked and I was able to reboot properly thank you in a side note is it impossible at this time to install twrp on a pixel 5?

Yes. The Pixel series, as with most A/B devices, do not have a bespoke recovery partition. The recovery kernel is compressed into the boot image. TWRP does not support compression in this way so it cannot be used as a replacement for the stock recovery. The only effective way to use TWRP is to live boot the image, use TWRP to do whatever you need to do, without installing it to /boot.

BTW the next time you need to restore your phone you can use the Android Flash Tool.

 

[musiv2]

Ok thank you for the explanation as I stated before I am new to the a/b partitioning way of android life so I have alot to learn

 

[AlexKarimov]

I used twrp in the past( on no A/B devices) but would recommend learning fastboot/adb. First step: always make sure USB debugging is enabled after every flash. This will make it so you can fix a lot of mistakes and recover your device. It's the first thing I do after every boot on a new install.

Here's the commands to flash stock to both slots. NOTE: this is for android 13. 12 and before will be a little different. Bootloader, radio and rom names should be exact to file, this is just for example.

fastboot --slot=all flash bootloader bootloader.img

fastboot reboot bootlaoder

fastboot --slot=all flash radio radio.img

fastboot reboot bootlaoder

fastboot --slot=a --skip-reboot update stock-image.zip

fastboot reboot bootlaoder

fastboot --slot=b --skip-reboot update stock-image.zip

fastboot -w

fastboot reboot

One final note: I put slot a first but I always start with the active slot(it's in the bootloader screen). If you want the android 12 instructions, let me know but it's not much different, you just use the stock recovery.