Pixel 5 Recovery questions

[drfreemlizard]

I recently bought an unlocked Pixel 5 from Amazon, only to discover it is (apparently) a VZW that was carrier unlocked, and so the OEM Unlock is not available. I am slowly making my peace with that fact, but am curious how much leeway I have to get at lease *some* more control.

When I boot into stock recovery, I have the option to mount /system. I am hoping this means I can pull, edit, and then push the build.prop and possibly other files as well. Perhaps also push the superuser binary. However, I am unable to detect my phone when I mount /system.

My system specs:

Windows 10 Pro
Version 21H2
OS Build 19044.2728

I have installed the latest drivers from Google.
I am able to detect and interact with my device in both ADB and Fastboot.

I was hoping being able to mount /system in the recovery menu meant I could use ADB shell and browse around the /system folder and tweak a few things. However, my computer behaves as though NOTHING is attached when I go into recovery. No "drivers not found" messages, no mysterious unidentified anything showing up in device manager.

Can anyone give me guidance as to how to get this working? Or am I not understanding how this is supposed to work?

 

[V0latyle]

Pixels do not have a recovery partition.; recovery lives in /boot alongside ramdisk and system kernel. Recovery is largely unnecessary from a modding perspective because of the ease of which we can directly flash device partitions.

 

[drfreemlizard]

Ok, but I can boot into stock recovery via "adb reboot recovery". From there I have the option to "Mount /system". I am hoping to be able to do that, then use adb to pull and then alter the build.prop file.

I can not flash device partitions because I cannot unlock the bootloader (I apparently have a Verizon phone.)