Possibly Bricked?

[premedicated]

Hey all. Hopefully someone can provide a little assistance with this..

TLDR; Phone was fine, this morning it went into a bootloop. Tried restore which didn't work, tried wiping which didn't work, wipe everything and installed a new factory image and now it still won't boot and recovery is giving "no command" but I can still see everything with fastboot.

So a few months ago I rooted my Pixel Xl and flashed a "official" 8.1.0 ROM on it along with TWRP and Magisk. Everything was going fine and then about a week ago my phone shut off and wouldn't turn back on. I had to hold the power button about thirty seconds for it to come back. That was the only issue until this morning. This morning the same thing happened, the phone had shut off at some point last night while it was plugged in and this morning it was a black screen. Again, I held the power button down for about thirty seconds until it booted up, but this time a couple minutes after it booted, it shut back off again. Rinse and repeat and every time the time on was shorter and shorter until it just got to the Google boot screen and would freeze up and shut off.

After playing with it for a little while trying to figure out what was going on, I tried to do a factory wipe/reset. That didn't resolve anything. I booted back into TWRP and tried to do a restore, but about 80% of the way through it froze up. I restarted the device and tried restore again, but it froze up towards the end once more. So I tried doing a wipe, then a restore but only the first two boxes checked, system and something else.. It completed successfully, but was still boot looping just like before.

Then I thought maybe it was something internal and did a full wipe of everything.. Still no luck. Then I figured since there wasn't much to lose, I pushed the newest factory image to the phone using platform tools/fastboot.

Now what I get is when I try to start the phone it'll go to the Google logo, then restart, then do that once more and then it will go to a little screen with the Android on his back and an exclamation saying "No command", which I'm assuming is recovery mode since it does the same thing when I try to go there.

I can access fastboot still and all the system menus, I don't care about losing my data obviously and I just need my phone to work. Is there anything I can do?

In the bootloader my information is..
BL: 8996-012001-1808030001
Baseband: 8996-130181-1806061856
Product/Variant: marlin-US-PVT
Serial Number: HT68Hxxxxxxx
CPU: MSM8996SG-AB 0x10001
UFS: 32GB Samsung
DRAM: 4096MB Samsung LPDDR4
Boot-slot: b
Console: DISABLED
Secure Boot: PRODUCTION
Device is UNLOCKED

 

[Phalanx7621]

Hey all. Hopefully someone can provide a little assistance with this..

TLDR; Phone was fine, this morning it went into a bootloop. Tried restore which didn't work, tried wiping which didn't work, wipe everything and installed a new factory image and now it still won't boot and recovery is giving "no command" but I can still see everything with fastboot.

So a few months ago I rooted my Pixel Xl and flashed a "official" 8.1.0 ROM on it along with TWRP and Magisk. Everything was going fine and then about a week ago my phone shut off and wouldn't turn back on. I had to hold the power button about thirty seconds for it to come back. That was the only issue until this morning. This morning the same thing happened, the phone had shut off at some point last night while it was plugged in and this morning it was a black screen. Again, I held the power button down for about thirty seconds until it booted up, but this time a couple minutes after it booted, it shut back off again. Rinse and repeat and every time the time on was shorter and shorter until it just got to the Google boot screen and would freeze up and shut off.

After playing with it for a little while trying to figure out what was going on, I tried to do a factory wipe/reset. That didn't resolve anything. I booted back into TWRP and tried to do a restore, but about 80% of the way through it froze up. I restarted the device and tried restore again, but it froze up towards the end once more. So I tried doing a wipe, then a restore but only the first two boxes checked, system and something else.. It completed successfully, but was still boot looping just like before.

Then I thought maybe it was something internal and did a full wipe of everything.. Still no luck. Then I figured since there wasn't much to lose, I pushed the newest factory image to the phone using platform tools/fastboot.

Now what I get is when I try to start the phone it'll go to the Google logo, then restart, then do that once more and then it will go to a little screen with the Android on his back and an exclamation saying "No command", which I'm assuming is recovery mode since it does the same thing when I try to go there.

I can access fastboot still and all the system menus, I don't care about losing my data obviously and I just need my phone to work. Is there anything I can do?

In the bootloader my information is..
BL: 8996-012001-1808030001
Baseband: 8996-130181-1806061856
Product/Variant: marlin-US-PVT
Serial Number: HT68Hxxxxxxx
CPU: MSM8996SG-AB 0x10001
UFS: 32GB Samsung
DRAM: 4096MB Samsung LPDDR4
Boot-slot: b
Console: DISABLED
Secure Boot: PRODUCTION
Device is UNLOCKED

Ok, so I'm assuming you have the latest factory image currently downloaded on your PC and extracted all the files to the same folder as fastboot/ADB. Hook up your phone to the PC and boot into the bootloader on the phone by powering on while holding in Volume Down + power. In the folder where you have fastboot on your PC, hold down shift and right click the mouse and select open command prompt (or powershell, depending on Windows version). Type fastboot devices to make sure your phone is being seen by your PC. If it is, type fastboot erase system, after that runs type fastboot erase userdata, once that runs type fastboot erase system, and finally fastboot erase boot. Then type fastboot --set-active=b , and run the same commands on that slot. Then type fastboot reboot bootloader, and when it reboots to bootloader type in flash-all.bat . That should wipe everything properly on both slots and install the latest factory image. If that doesn't work then I would say there's definitely a hardware defect. Also if it doesn't work I would try a different port on your PC.

 

[premedicated]

Ok, so I'm assuming you have the latest factory image currently downloaded on your PC and extracted all the files to the same folder as fastboot/ADB.

Inside of the factory image file, once unzipped there is another zip file contained in there with the same name. Do I need to extract that as well since it has options such as boot.img, keymaster.img and several other .img files in it, or do you just extract the main files containing bootloader-marlin-8996-012001-1808030001.img, flash-all.bat, etc.?

Then type fastboot --set-active=b , and run the same commands on that slot.

Awesome, thanks for the reply. Question though since i'm not entirely sure about the slots. Since it's already reading it as slot B, will I change the active to slot A at some point or will running those commands in slot B erase slot A, as I understand that it basically works in whatever slot is not active.

 

[Phalanx7621]

It should detect slot A by defualt, but as long as you run those commands for both slots you'll be wiping it clean. Keep in mind we aren't talking about TWRP, we're in fastboot. And no, once you extract the files from the zip you don't need to extract the other file inside of it. The flash-all command will read it and do the proper magic. Just make sure the extracted files are in the folder with fastboot/ADB.

 

[premedicated]

Well, I followed it to a T with your first post and I made it further than before. I got it all the way to where it asked if I wanted to copy files and then it froze. Restarted and it made it to finding my sim before it restarted and then it makes it to a different point before restarting, which is further than I made it before, however it still hasn't made it all the way into the software, so I guess I'm pretty well screwed unless it's something with Slot A. But I'm pretty doubtful at this point.

Update: Now it won't make it past the Google logo anymore again...

 

[premedicated]

Ok, so it still isn't working. I'm going to try flashing the 8.1.0 image in a bit and see if maybe that some how resolves it. Doubtful, but it's my last step before I go spend a thousand dollars buying a new phone..

A couple questions though, when I flash-all I'm getting a lot of "Archive does not contain 'xxxxx.xxx'" errors. Archive does not contain boot.sig, boot_other.img, dtbo.img, dt.img, odm.img, product.img, product-services.img, recovery.img (this one seems important..), super.img, system.sig, vbmeta.sig and vendor.sig are all missing from the archive. This normal?

Also, I can play around in bootloader and I could in TWRP before it was erased for hours with no reboot or anything, but once the OS starts to load or loads, that's when it freezes up and fails. If it was a hardware issue shouldn't it be restarting regardless of what I'm running under?

Just trying to expend all my options before spending more ludicrous amounts of time for a piece of hardware that can just die without reason.