How To Guide Safely convert regions (includes T-Mobile) as well as restore the ability to use OOS12 after using Indian MSM to recover from a brick (Windows only)

[EtherealRemnant]

It seems lots of us have had to use the India 9 Pro MSM to recover our devices and in the process, we lose the ability to go back to OOS12 or ROMs based on that firmware because the touchscreen stops working and also trying to convert T-Mobile variants, the fastboot scripts are just bricking them. Well I found a fix for these issues. Those who just want to convert can skip the MSM Tool process and get right to the conversion process as long as they're already running OOS11.

First thing is first, you need to be on OOS11. If you have a T-Mobile variant and you have flashed it with India firmware, you have to use a modded T-Mobile MSM: https://xdaforums.com/t/global-11-2...ariant-flashing-as-well.4454357/post-87050821

If you have a T-Mobile variant that hasn't used the Indian 9 Pro MSM Tool, is on OOS12, and you're just wanting to convert, you need this tool: https://xdaforums.com/t/oneplus-9-11-2-22-2-t-mobile-msm-download-tool.4276119/

If you have a global variant or a global variant that has been flashed with Indian firmware, you can use this MSM (choose O2 for global or India for India in the Target dropdown, check Sha256, uncheck use lite firehose, it's a multi-target MSM Tool): https://mega.nz/file/ZWtGxTSb#UZ6aSOR2UTYrCao2fQNJ1IN5LSxPNBOxzel1kihnnJs

If you don't know how to use the MSM Tool, there are other guides around here, that's outside of the scope of this post.

Once you are back on OOS11, unlock the bootloader. We also need USB debugging enabled.

Now we need a tool called Fastboot Enhance. This wonderful tool allows you to directly flash OTAs from fastbootd and it doesn't have the same brick risk that flashing with fastboot scripts does.

Download it and unzip it somewhere.

Next we need the OOS11 global downgrade package (or whatever region you are wanting to switch to, global is recommended for T-Mobile variants) from here: https://xdaforums.com/t/oneplus-9-rom-ota-oxygen-os-repo-of-oxygen-os-builds.4254579/

Fire up command prompt in the folder you have your platform tools and run:

adb reboot fastboot (if you do adb reboot bootloader you will then need to type fastboot reboot fastboot to get to fastbootd)

This will take you into fastbootd. It will have a screen that has three different languages to choose from on it. Go ahead and fire up Fastboot Enhance now.

It may take a few seconds for the app to recognize the device but when you see it in the list, double-click it to get to the main screen.



Check that it says that the device is in fastbootd. Now we just need to click Flash Payload.bin and choose the OTA we downloaded earlier (we don't even need to extract the zip, the app does that for us). If it pops up with an unrecognized partitions error, you're either not in fastbootd, you didn't MSM back to stock (you cannot do this with a custom recovery), or you grabbed an OOS12 OTA. Do not continue and check that everything is correct otherwise you will brick and have to start all over with the MSM Tool. Likewise, if it pops up an alert about cow partitions, don't continue. Go to the partitions screen and search for cow and delete them all.

Once it's done, boot the device, factory reset it in the settings (this is mandatory as Fastboot Enhance does not erase the device like a normal downgrade would do and this can cause problems), set it back up, and then do the OTA process to get back to where you want to go.

 

[applyscience]

Hey bud. So I ended up having too india again. After flashing nameless, it locked up completely. I followed along, but maybe I made a mistake around this point?

Once I was able to boot into India, i just used another msmtoolkit, this successfully converted my Pro to the proper OP 9 5g (the cutout for the cam was aligned so it worked) and i was now on 11.2.10.10

i then let the phone just OTA itself to Android 12.1 c.48


this is when i attempted to get into the latest nameless ROM that requires us to go from OOS 11 based system for the tom to A12.

did i mess up? Should i have flashed 12.1 again?

because the additional flash requirements were fairly straight forward. .

i unlocked the bootloader and then re-enabled /adb debugging the 12.1 and rebooted to bootloader

i flashed the 3 images i extracted from the payload of the latest 12.1 nameless zip and flashed them

fastboot flash boot boot.img
fastboot flash vendor_boot vendor_boot.img
fastboot flash dtbo dtbo.img

while in the same fastboot, i selected recovery boot. i was in the lineage recovery system, this is where i formatted and sideloaded in the same session

when i rebooted i was qualcom killed. could sitll fastboot but nothing would take so i just started over. i am now on my 2nd toolkit flash (india-pro to non-pro global.

i may just stick with the latest release that doesnt require 12. it doesnt help that im 2 days no sleep (unrelated but not helping) but even saying that, i feel i had most of what was required done, but im a big dummy so who knows

youre knowledge is sexy

 

[zacattackkc]

THANK YOU SIR, true gentleman. Your post I guess was the only one convincing enough that it was finally brushed through the beta testing phase enough that it would be worth trying. No real risk here considering its just using that awesome tool you mentioned in the post, which i've never heard of. will be using for now on. Dunno about any testing with this method so i thought i would owe the community my post. i saw the sahara error post not too long ago talking about a fix with no testing yet xD that made me laugh honestly. But yeah my phone is now converted global through payload.bin flash in fastbootd. Tmo Variant had me & my girls phone networked unlocked through the one guy that was doing it for free on here a while back.. then applied for unlock code and did it officially, never tried to convert due to brick concerns, so i had the easy route through the methods involved in this post, considering i was still on oos 11 with bootloader unlocked when reading this. anyways, i think its safe to say its fixed pretty hyped to flash roms now and not get bootlooped and excited to see where this variant is gonna go! thanks again mate.

 

[EtherealRemnant]

Hey bud. So I ended up having too india again. After flashing nameless, it locked up completely. I followed along, but maybe I made a mistake around this point?

Once I was able to boot into India, i just used another msmtoolkit, this successfully converted my Pro to the proper OP 9 5g (the cutout for the cam was aligned so it worked) and i was now on 11.2.10.10

i then let the phone just OTA itself to Android 12.1 c.48


this is when i attempted to get into the latest nameless ROM that requires us to go from OOS 11 based system for the tom to A12.

did i mess up? Should i have flashed 12.1 again?

because the additional flash requirements were fairly straight forward. .

i unlocked the bootloader and then re-enabled /adb debugging the 12.1 and rebooted to bootloader

i flashed the 3 images i extracted from the payload of the latest 12.1 nameless zip and flashed them





while in the same fastboot, i selected recovery boot. i was in the lineage recovery system, this is where i formatted and sideloaded in the same session

when i rebooted i was qualcom killed. could sitll fastboot but nothing would take so i just started over. i am now on my 2nd toolkit flash (india-pro to non-pro global.

i may just stick with the latest release that doesnt require 12. it doesnt help that im 2 days no sleep (unrelated but not helping) but even saying that, i feel i had most of what was required done, but im a big dummy so who knows

youre knowledge is sexy

Did you use the copy partitions zip? You will brick if you don't do that after a MSM.

Process is:

MSM
Upgrade to C.48
Extract boot, dtbo, and vendor_boot from ROM
Fastboot flash dtbo, vendor_boot, and boot in that order
Reboot to recovery
Factory reset
Run copy partitions script
Reboot recovery
Flash ROM
Reboot

It shouldn't brick if you follow that process exactly.

THANK YOU SIR, true gentleman. Your post I guess was the only one convincing enough that it was finally brushed through the beta testing phase enough that it would be worth trying. No real risk here considering its just using that awesome tool you mentioned in the post, which i've never heard of. will be using for now on. Dunno about any testing with this method so i thought i would owe the community my post. i saw the sahara error post not too long ago talking about a fix with no testing yet xD that made me laugh honestly. But yeah my phone is now converted global through payload.bin flash in fastbootd. Tmo Variant had me & my girls phone networked unlocked through the one guy that was doing it for free on here a while back.. then applied for unlock code and did it officially, never tried to convert due to brick concerns, so i had the easy route through the methods involved in this post, considering i was still on oos 11 with bootloader unlocked when reading this. anyways, i think its safe to say its fixed pretty hyped to flash roms now and not get bootlooped and excited to see where this variant is gonna go! thanks again mate.

Awesome, glad that it worked for you! There were two other testers before you as well as myself that have confirmed this method works, I guess I should have put that in the post. Thanks for being a guinea pig

 

[zacattackkc]

question; so now that i did it through advanced boot app, does that mean my phone is officially seen as a global one? can i use global regular msm? can i use fastboot payload files for global, ect?

 

[EtherealRemnant]

question; so now that i did it through advanced boot app, does that mean my phone is officially seen as a global one? can i use global regular msm? can i use fastboot payload files for global, ect?

So your phone will be seen as global by OTAs but not the MSM. You would have to use a modded MSM Tool that flashes global firmware while targeting your device model.

 

[zacattackkc]

So your phone will be seen as global by OTAs but not the MSM. You would have to use a modded MSM Tool that flashes global firmware while targeting your device model.

damn.. that seems to be the culprit of everyone's hard brick.. so what about fastboot flashing oem software for global? I'm guessing that's not a problem because otas are of similar format, but just in a smaller package because it's adding only the updated parts instead of the full ROM.. and is this enhanced fastboot app an alternative to using msmtool and then unlocking bootloader and then flashing custom roms? kinda seems like it would be. and as a matter of fact after using the enhanced fastboot tool I went ahead and put it into fastbootd and flashed payload and it wouldn't boot at first. The app itself gave me an error regarding some cow partitions (really strange and very new concept for me) and told me that I could possibly fix everything if I deleted the cow partitions so I did and then formatted data and it booted into nameless AOSP. This might be the new way to flash custom roms due to the simple fact that it's way quicker than having to use NSM tool and then unlock bootloader and then do all the intricate flashing custom ROM parts. Just put in a fast boot d and flash just always have to make sure you format data afterwards to decrypt. This hasn't been fully tested at least not that I'm aware of

 

[EtherealRemnant]

damn.. that seems to be the culprit of everyone's hard brick.. so what about fastboot flashing oem software for global? I'm guessing that's not a problem because otas are of similar format, but just in a smaller package because it's adding only the updated parts instead of the full ROM.. and is this enhanced fastboot app an alternative to using msmtool and then unlocking bootloader and then flashing custom roms? kinda seems like it would be. and as a matter of fact after using the enhanced fastboot tool I went ahead and put it into fastbootd and flashed payload and it wouldn't boot at first. The app itself gave me an error regarding some cow partitions (really strange and very new concept for me) and told me that I could possibly fix everything if I deleted the cow partitions so I did and then formatted data and it booted into nameless AOSP. This might be the new way to flash custom roms due to the simple fact that it's way quicker than having to use NSM tool and then unlock bootloader and then do all the intricate flashing custom ROM parts. Just put in a fast boot d and flash just always have to make sure you format data afterwards to decrypt. This hasn't been fully tested at least not that I'm aware of

So honestly I haven't wanted to mess with it too much because it's such a chore to MSM and set everything back up. I can confirm the conversion works as long as you don't ignore any errors and continue (as you found out yourself with the cow files) but as for switching between custom ROMs, fastbootd is part of the custom recovery that we use to flash these ROMs and I don't know if it's possible to get a full flash using that custom recovery. When I tried to use an OOS12 OTA to skip having to use the MSM Tool to go back to stock, I got a partitions error and it rebooted to fastboot. Upon trying to flash the stock boot, dtbo, and vendor_boot, it bricked. I decided it was more important to figure out how to help people with their initial conversion process and I was frustrated because this particular brick was refusing to go into edl until I putzed around with the phone for a few minutes and managed to get it. It just isn't worth me possibly having an unrecoverable brick so I didn't mess with it any further.

In theory though, moving between custom ROMs using the same base firmware should be fine. People will have to test and find out.

 

[YourLocalDund33]

So honestly I haven't wanted to mess with it too much because it's such a chore to MSM and set everything back up. I can confirm the conversion works as long as you don't ignore any errors and continue (as you found out yourself with the cow files) but as for switching between custom ROMs, fastbootd is part of the custom recovery that we use to flash these ROMs and I don't know if it's possible to get a full flash using that custom recovery. When I tried to use an OOS12 OTA to skip having to use the MSM Tool to go back to stock, I got a partitions error and it rebooted to fastboot. Upon trying to flash the stock boot, dtbo, and vendor_boot, it bricked. I decided it was more important to figure out how to help people with their initial conversion process and I was frustrated because this particular brick was refusing to go into edl until I putzed around with the phone for a few minutes and managed to get it. It just isn't worth me possibly having an unrecoverable brick so I didn't mess with it any further.

In theory though, moving between custom ROMs using the same base firmware should be fine. People will have to test and find out.

ive been playing with them for the last 20 hours almost nonstop. im back to being tmobile but no msm tool (yet) will work with it. I tried almost every tmobile msm and a plethora of others have yet to work with it since. i also cant get my unlock_code.bin to work since i think somehow the code dont match with the region that it was applied with was. so i cant unlock my bootloader to get any conversion scripts or flashing commands to work. fastbootenhanced doesn't work either. i dont know what to do, please help me cuz i goofed hard as hell somewhere.

 

[EtherealRemnant]

ive been playing with them for the last 20 hours almost nonstop. im back to being tmobile but no msm tool (yet) will work with it. I tried almost every tmobile msm and a plethora of others have yet to work with it since. i also cant get my unlock_code.bin to work since i think somehow the code dont match with the region that it was applied with was. so i cant unlock my bootloader to get any conversion scripts or flashing commands to work. fastbootenhanced doesn't work either. i dont know what to do, please help me cuz i goofed hard as hell somewhere.

Is the MSM saying device not match image, is it an unsupported target TMO error, what's the error?

 

[YourLocalDund33]

Is the MSM saying device not match image, is it an unsupported target TMO error, what's the error?

the msm is saying its a device mismatch and it thinks its the Indian variant but everything else is T-Mobile (stock), sorry about the late reply, its a holiday for me here.
Edit: I am Android version 12 now on T-Mobile, but I trying to get back to global rooted if that helps any with where I'm wanting to go with it
Edit 2: when I tried to use the multi msm tool provides I couldn't get O2 to show as an option anywhere, only Indian again.

 

[EtherealRemnant]

the msm is saying its a device mismatch and it thinks its the Indian variant but everything else is T-Mobile (stock), sorry about the late reply, its a holiday for me here.
Edit: I am Android version 12 now on T-Mobile, but I trying to get back to global rooted if that helps any with where I'm wanting to go with it
Edit 2: when I tried to use the multi msm tool provides I couldn't get O2 to show as an option anywhere, only Indian again.

If it thinks it's an Indian variant, you use my modded MSM and select India for the target.

 

[borg79]

I recovered my bricked LE2110 from Oneplus 9 pro Indian msm tools and I wish to restore it to Oneplus 9 global rom. I try to use the "Fastboot enhance (version 1.3)" to flash the payload.bin into my LE2110, but I cannot find any "lfash" button ! The only button I can see is "Extract Image", am I missing something ? I try local upgrade but it cannot find the firmware file ! Please help !

 

[YourLocalDund33]

If it thinks it's an Indian variant, you use my modded MSM and select India for the target.

Thats why i edited my post, I tried to use the modded tool but it only gives the option for the indian variant. the 02 option is not there boss.

 

[EtherealRemnant]

Thats why i edited my post, I tried to use the modded tool but it only gives the option for the indian variant. the 02 option is not there boss.

Which mod are you using? There have been a bunch posted in this forum.

 

[YourLocalDund33]

Which mod are you using? There have been a bunch posted in this forum.

the one from the op. its the one thats said its multi support for indian and global

 

[EtherealRemnant]

the one from the op. its the one thats said its multi support for indian and global

Try this one.

3.56 GB file on MEGA

mega.nz

That one is also multi target. Both of these have been tested, I don't know why it's not working for you. You can also try not selecting a target and see what happens, I have found I don't always need to select the target if my device firmware hasn't been too corrupted.

Beware that with this one, you can't unlock the bootloader until after you go to OOS12 because OnePlus bugged the erase script on 11.2.10.10.

 

[YourLocalDund33]

Try this one.

3.56 GB file on MEGA

mega.nz

That one is also multi target. Both of these have been tested, I don't know why it's not working for you. You can also try not selecting a target and see what happens, I have found I don't always need to select the target if my device firmware hasn't been too corrupted.

Beware that with this one, you can't unlock the bootloader until after you go to OOS12 because OnePlus bugged the erase script on 11.2.10.10.

I'm already OOS12. still couldn't unlock bootloader. I was on chat with Oneplus support for an hour or so just a few minutes ago. They were a little slow with understanding the situation (didn't mention to them using a lot of modded msm tools) but I did tell them I used the tool to reset it to stock. that and my unlock_code.bin was no longer working. They put me on chat with the higher team and then the supervisor herself overtook chat and had a look at when my original application for my phone was. She decided she will reissue me a new code and said after 24-48hrs ill get the new code via email. How familiar are you with the erase script with the msm tool?

 

[EtherealRemnant]

I'm already OOS12. still couldn't unlock bootloader. I was on chat with Oneplus support for an hour or so just a few minutes ago. They were a little slow with understanding the situation (didn't mention to them using a lot of modded msm tools) but I did tell them I used the tool to reset it to stock. that and my unlock_code.bin was no longer working. They put me on chat with the higher team and then the supervisor herself overtook chat and had a look at when my original application for my phone was. She decided she will reissue me a new code and said after 24-48hrs ill get the new code via email. How familiar are you with the erase script with the msm tool?

It's not the MSM Tool that's borked, it's the ROM itself.

 

[Nick James]

Looking for a stock c61 LE2115 Global boot.img (oneplus 9)
I overwrote mine trying to root and now I can't get the phone to boot back into c61. I have access to fastboot though